Heroes R' Them

"Fantastic Four?"  Let's not get ahead of ourselves.  (Film review)

by Michael Sean McGowan

The Upside: It is pure fluff. 

The Downside: It is pure fluff

     Like a label on a carton of cigarettes, I've got to issue a warning to this review.  I'm not sure if my more positive feelings for Fantastic Four stem from its attempts to work as a comedy, or the fact that, as a defense mechanism, I chose to look at it as a comedy.  If its the latter this could mean a revolution in critiquing film- just paint the movie in whatever shade you want and give it a stamp of approval.  In that spirit, Troy actually wasn't a bungled historical epic, it was a curious little movie about a bunch of Greeks with an enormous wooden horse fetish.  Bewitched wasn't a rotten comedy, it... uh, okay, this one defeats me.  But you get my drift.

    There is a yellow flag condition around my recommending a movie like Fantastic Four when the strongest thing I can say in its favor is that it doesn't come out as a repeat of the disaster that last year's wretched Catwoman created.  Fantastic Four is junk, but it is harmless, speedy junk that never pretends to be loftier than it is.  If anyone enjoys it, I mean really enjoys it, be willing to bet good money that they liked it as kind of a silly, guilty pleasure or as two-hours of Jessica Alba in skin-tight coveralls.

    In my recent review for Batman Begins I wrote, "The term "origin story" gets plenty of exasperated sighs from comic book aficionados; after all, when these stories become so ingrained in our pop culture psyche, why the need to retell them again?"  Like Batman Begins, Fantastic Four is all origin-story; the tale of four astronauts who go into space and end up stranded on an uncharted desert island...  Uh, wait... that's Gilligan's Island.  Anyway, this fearless foursome go into space to conduct scientific experiments using only the finest Star Trek-inspired nonsense doublespeak and are exposed to massive amounts of radiation by a solar storm.  This, in turn, doesn't give them cancer, but "fundamentally alters [their] DNA" and allows them to do such things like throw flames or stretch like a human Gumby doll.  It's funny, these kind of superhero movies... all this time I thought things like being bitten by a radioactive spider or being bombarded by massive amounts of radiation from a solar storm would make you, like, you know, dead.  Talk about the things they never taught me in science class...

    Nevertheless, I bring up Batman because unlike Christopher Nolan's minor masterpiece, Fantastic Four finds nothing particularly trenchant or meaningful in the transformation into a superhero, such as when Ben Grimm (aka The Thing) wakes up looking like someone's driveway resurfacing project.  This is one of the first clues that Fantastic Four isn't  taking itself seriously.  The characters discuss their superpowers not like they have become radically unique specimens of nature, but with the kind of annoyance you'd find in someone missing a bus to work on a rainy Monday morning.  Superhero stories have always worked best when they have been just a little bit dark.  This isn't Fantastic Four, where there is little plot, little conflict, and nothing is really at stake.  The biggest trauma our heroes have to deal with here is the disposable question of whether flexible Mr. Fantastic/Reed Richards will tell Sue Storm/The Invisible Woman that he loves her.

    I have to think (relatively) highly of Fantastic Four mostly because it made me laugh.  However that question of self-defense still comes into play.  While, in some ways, it works as kind of a parody of superhero movies (the heroes become instant media celebrities, with even their own line of action figures), you never quite shake the feeling that it is a lackluster entry in a subgenre that has seen some truly magnificent works lately and uses a general guffaw-inducing screenplay to gloss over the movie's far less polished qualities.  While it never bogs down, it is fairly featherweight, too, and some of the dialogue becomes maddeningly quaint ("What if we got these powers for a reason?" resident flame-boy Johnny Storm asks).

    The charisma factor depends greatly on the leads, at least most of them.  Michael Chiklis (The Thing) has always been a favorite of mine, and here does his Commish-style adorable lug thing at top notch.  Like his entry in last year's forgettable Cellular, Chris Evans (The Human Torch) tries heartily to be the wisecracking comic relief, but the whole act seems a bit stale and repetitive, especially contrasted to Chiklis' no-bull**** sobering dry wit.  Ioan Gruffudd (okay dude, I know you're making that name up) looks appropriately daffy and befuddled as Richards, an MIT nerd who makes your average Stargate fan look socially nominal.  The black hole of the group is Jessica Alba as Sue Storm, who... well let's just say the walking rock quarry puts out more personality than her.  Yesterday I mentioned this film in talking about Dark Water and the kind of high-brow roles Jennifer Connelly likes to play, and now while I think that a role like this would definitely be a step down from Dark Water, I can imagine the kind of life Connelly could bring to the part.

    The plot is simplicity in itself- when the space experiment goes wrong, the evil corporate sponsor of the disaster, Dr. Victor Von Doom, decides to wage war on the heroes for no reason made clear, except that maybe he was never allowed to sit at the cool kids' table in junior high school.  Von Doom is played by Julian McMahon with the requisite amounts of glowering and threats delivered in a low, menacing voice.  But I found myself wondering- how did this guy ever manage to build a thriving company in the first place when he has the personality of a fire ant?  Was there a strangely large block of people who didn't see the obvious problems working for a man with the word "doom" in his name?

    Fantastic Four is the kind of movie that couldn't survive outside of summer.  There's no real meat to it; it'll have been forgotten when movies like Superman, Batman Begins, and Spider-Man 2 are still heralded as the perfect visual Cliff notes to our comic book dreams.  But maybe that was the way it was intended.  Director Tim Story was baptized in comedy (his film debut was the breakout hit Barbershop) and it serves him well that he sticks to his roots.  Overall, I liked this movie, but I wouldn't recommend it because it skirts the razor-thin line between trashy fun and just plain trash so narrowly its a roll of the dice where the average filmgoer will end up.  So there you have it- a movie that has rendered a review completely useless.  I can't think of a single superhero who could manage that.  B-

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