REVIEW: Fantastic Four (2005)

I spend a lot of time defending movies that I know other people don't (or won't like). We're talking lots of time, here, quality time, time that I could be spending doing charity work for orphans or trying to take the staples out of Miss September's chest. With great sadness and confusion, it appears that that time is once again at hand, because I really enjoyed Tim Story's movie version of Fantastic Four.

I was never a fan of the FF (that's what the cool kids call them), despite being a life-long comics reader. I bought exactly one issue of their book, because it had a cool embossed cover and it only featured the Human Torch and Spider-Man, so it was more like an issue of Spider-Man featuring a man on fire (and tell me that doesn't sound like good reading). I'm explaining this because I want you all to know that I didn't enjoy the movie for purely geeky reasons. I didn't groan at the casting because I didn't care, I didn't watch and rewatch the trailers, and I never even considered paying out ten bucks to see it in a theater -- and then the reviews seemed to range from mediocre to terrible, and I usually agree with Ebert (who one-starred it). It was pretty much a moment of "well, I have a space in my Netflix queue" that made me rent it.

Here's the digest version of the plot: Reed Richards, Sue and Johnny Storm, Ben Grimm, and Victor von Doom blast off into space in order to study a looming "cosmic storm." Reed is the brainy scientist, Ben is the lovable but gruff co-pilot, Sue looks like Jessica Alba, her brother Johnny is an immature hotshot, and Doom is the asshole scientist and leader of some kind of corporation. Also, Sue looks like Jessica Alba. She and Reed used to date, but now Doom and Sue are dating. (Or not. I couldn't tell if it was just weird innuendo or an actual relationship.) There's a sudden change in the storm, and they get zapped.

Once on earth, each of them starts to manifest strange powers: Reed can stretch and contort his body in ways that are usually reserved for top-shelf porn, and Sue can turn invisible (Good going, movie. Make the hot actress invisible.); Johnny can shoot fire and fly, and Ben finds his skin covered in an ugly, hard, rock-like shell that apparently gives him super-strength. Doom has some kind of vague set of powers that I don't recognize from the comics, where he's part metal and can shoot lightning bolts.

Then, they fight. The end -- OR IS IT???

There are subplots about Reed and Sue's relationship, and of course Ben's adjustments to his new appearance and his later romance with a blind artist. Johnny gets his own little set of sequences where he acts like a jerk. Doom gets plenty of screentime which he uses pretty much none of to explain his motivations, so the audience is apt to think he's just a major asshole that talks a lot about nothing while he stares off into the distance.

It's a really simple flick, and that's kind of what I like about it. For a huge-budget action picture, it was surprisingly small-scale and... well, I'd hate to use the word "intimate," but I don't have my thesaurus handy. Think "intimate" without "depth". It's what most people would consider to be a true "comic book movie," a superficial bit of entertainment that succeeds because it occasionally rises above the material, and doesn't sink too far below to discredit the whole thing. It certainly lacks the heart of the Spider-Man series, and the intensity and scope of some of the Batman flicks, but I'd still call it above-average fluff. I laughed most of the times that I was supposed to laugh, and with a little bit of imagination I could buy into most of the relationships and performances.

I say most, because for the life of me I can't figure out what the actual plot was doing. Doom is an asshole that's jealous of Reed's returning relationship with Sue, and on top of that he gets fired by his corporation because of the bad publicity the space accident caused. Why creating four celebrity superheroes is bad publicity for a corporation is beyond my comprehension, though. Doom is angry at his company, okay. Doom is angry at Reed, fine. Doom wants Sue, perfectly believable. These things make sense individually, but do not sufficiently explain Doom's crazy destructive behavior later, nor why he feels the need to destroy all four of them (Sue included?) and then take out chunks of Manhattan. Maybe he's just a really big asshole. I know other New Yorkers like that.

The acting, too, was about par for the genre. Ioan Gruffudd was decent as the awkward Mr. Fantastic, and despite what I'd heard Jessica Alba didn't embarass herself as the Invisible Girl. Michael Chiklis didn't quite live up to the hype that I'd heard about him in the Thing suit, but Chris Evans certainly did. Johnny's antics were a big part of what made the movie work for me, and even though he got the best lines there was some good comic acting to boot. Julian McMahon was the low point of the ensemble, because there was never anything believable about the character to begin with, and he didn't add anything to make up for the shoddy script. Bad dialogue and one-dimensional acting do not a good villain make.

I'm pretty lenient on the plot side, since watching the movie is more or less about getting from special effects sequence to funny part to special effects sequence. I probably would've enjoyed it just as much if the Fantastic Four stumbled upon Doom robbing a 7-11, and then Johnny said something funny, and then back to Doom breaking the burrito microwave. As I've said, it's a pretty superficial movie, but if the fluff parts are done well enough, the failed deeper bits matter less. It's not high art and it's far from fantastic, but I appreciated the parts that worked and ignored the parts that didn't. I'm not entirely ashamed to say that I'm looking forward to a (hopefully improved) sequel -- there just aren't enough drive-in kinda flicks these days.

I think that the Lady Retropolitan summed it up best during the climax: "I'm enthralled despite myself." I don't think I can make a more clearly-stated review than that one.




And yes, I know that the last photo is from a different movie.