Fantastic Four
After my recent tirade against the recent influx of half-arsed thrown together superhero comic book adaptations I was primed to shred this film to pieces. All the buzz was that it sucked. The Internet geeks seemed to take offence at the sacrilege. I was gonna give it a miss altogether, but I was also aching to prove my tirade right, and plus, I had a free ticket and sometimes pulling apart a film helps boost my own fragile ego.
Let's get something straight – this is a kids film. This is an unabashed goofy non-pretentious kids flick where action reigns supreme and as such it's hard to criticize this on an even playing field as something like Spiderman, X-Men, or Batman Begins (which takes itself super-dooper-seriously – despite the huge toy range available). To be fair, with all the talent and hype behind the new Batman film it was always going to have to try hard to impress me, and I hate that film's flaws mainly because I really wanted it to be good. Fantastic Four is probably very, very average, but I'm not going to waste my time taking something seriously which doesn't take itself seriously at all. After the first few minutes I realised the analytical side of my brain wasn't needed and switched it off (which is good, as it left me more brain power to imagine some very intricate sexual situations I hope one day to find myself in with The Alba).
Although the bald guy from The Shield as The Thing leads the pack as being the action figure most kids will probably buy, and The Alba will have teen boys running home and locking themselves in their bathrooms for months, as far as I'm concerned Chris Evans as the Human Torch is the star of the film (the other guy as Mr Fantastic is pretty much a non-entity here). The Torch gets all the good lines and Evans plays him with just the right mix of cocky and, um, arrogant. Okay, so there isn't much to the character, but he is kind of funny. The effects on his ‘flame' are superb, which nearly makes up for some of the films crappier CG efforts, of which there are more than a few – remembering the director of this film is the director of Barber Shop and probably didn't know what CGI even was until recently.
There are plenty of other flaws to be found here. The Fantastic Four become celebrities instantaneously, despite the only heroics they show is saving a few people from destruction – THAT THEY CAUSED!!! Von Doom turns against the Four because he is angry that they caused his ‘mutation' that gives him all this power – POWER THAT HE LOVES AND WANTS MORE OF??? The film also has a screwball comedy montage that's hilarious in all the wrong ways, like Mr. Fantastic stretching to get more toilet, and repeats the same joke about The Thing accidentally breaking something about 12 million times.
Yes, this is not a very good film, but it looks like it was never meant to be one. If they were going for good dumb fun (kind of like a comic-book, you may say) they very nearly succeeded, in fact teen boys the world over may suggest they succeeded very much. I thought I would want to tear this thing apart, but it's not good enough or bad enough to warrant any passionate outburst one way or the other. I'm never going to see this film again but I don't regret that I spent a few hours in its company, and while it isn't the film to reverse the crumbling quality of comic-book super-hero films, it isn't anywhere near as frustrating as something like Batman Begins which is almost joyless in its empty pursuit to imbue itself with a grandeur and significance that it never finds. Fantastic Four on the other hand is content to just be a flashy and loud comic book film, and it's probably better for it.