Fantastic 4 - Ray's Review

Fantastic 4
2005
105 mins

Directed by Tim Story (Taxi, Barbershop)
Written by Michael France and Mark Frost
Starring:
Ioan Gruffudd as Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic
Michael Chiklis as Ben Grimm/The Thing
Jessica Alba as Susan Storm/The Invisible Woman
Chris Evans as Johnny Storm/The Human Torch
Julian McMahon as Victor Von Doom/Doctor Doom

More details available at IMDb - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120667/

The Optimist:
I was hoping to be pleasantly surprised by Fantastic 4 and guess what? I was! Firstly I am not a big fan of the comic but I do recall reading a few when I was a young boy and being primarily interested in The Thing - who turned out to be most interesting character in the film too. For an origin story that had to introduce no less then five main characters I think the writers did an excellent job. Each of the leads were well established and had very distinct personalities (if a little simplistic, but I'll leave that to the cynic to talk about).

The film moved at a very tight pace and before you had time to finish your ice-cream they had all gone up into space, been exposed to the radiation cloud (that permanently alters their DNA) and come back down to earth to try and figure out what exactly had happened to them. I was instantly engaged in the performances and found them all to be quite charismatic - particularly Ioan Gruffudd/Mr Fantastic, I felt he had a strong presence and an innate likability, not to mention a real movie star quality about him. Michael Chiklis/The Thing and Chris Evans/The Human Torch played off each other for laughs and had the audience cracking up consistently. I thought The Thing was amazingly expressive considering how much make-up he was buried under (though I've heard comic fans have issues with his face being considerably different from the comic book, but as I don't recall the comic version I had no such problem).

Jessica Alba provided the love interest for both Mr Fantastic and the bad guy (aptly named Doctor Doom). She also Provided some nice eye candy via some extremely low cut tops. The visual effects were all fairly well done, not entirely convincing, but then they had to show stuff that is totally absurd so how real can that ever look? I was a little concerned when I checked out the directors resume but I think he made the transition to all out action film remarkably well and managed to find a good balance between action and character development (especially considering the tight pace of the film). Speaking of the action I was very happy to see that the action was shot wide (unlike Batman Begins) and I always had a sense of the geography of each sequence.

Overall I was entertained, never bored and had quite a few laughs. I think I would check this out again on DVD and even consider buying it.

The Cynic:
This is a film based on a comic and as a result the characters were fairly one dimensional (not that all comic book films fall into this trap). Mr Fantastic is a geek. Dr Doom is a megalomaniac. The Invisible Woman is the attractive and feisty love interest. The Thing is tough yet conflicted and The Human Torch is a hot-head pretty boy (who's quips made me laugh to begin with but grew tiresome by the end). But can I really criticize this? I mean if you walk into a film of this kind you would have to be mad to expect multi-layered deep characters right?

My primary problem lay in Dr Doom. I just wasn't entirely sure why he wanted to kill off the Fantastic 4. Sure Mr Fantastic was the competition for the woman he wanted but I thought his primary interest was power? Couldn't he have just left New York (or America for that matter) and gone and used his powers somewhere where the Fantastic 4 would be unable to stop him? Well I guess the optimist in me let that slide too seeing as we would then have a crap plot with no conflict! But how many generic bad scientist/doctor guys can we really handle? Wasn't Green Goblin and Doc Ock enough? At least Dr Doom wasn't trying to destroy the world with a devious plan... or was he? I found myself drifting off whenever he had a monologue (but thankfully he didn't rave on too often).

Action wise I feel it could have done with a few more solid fights. We had the cool bit on a bridge establishing everyone's powers a little more and then apart from a little conflict here and there the only other real action scene was the ending, which was OK but it just didn't get me excited or give me that tingling feeling you sometimes get when a action scene really excites. I don't feel they really came up with as ingenious uses for their powers as The Incredibles managed, there just wasn't that same sense of inventiveness (such as when Elastigirl is caught between several doors). In fact the similarities between several of their powers to characters in The Incredibles is almost detrimental to Fantastic 4 as none of the abilities are explored as fulfillingly. But then Fantastic 4 character abilities were probably an inspiration for The Incredibles anyway so it's a moot point.

Now I could get negative regarding some the visual effects and have the usual argument that some stuff just didn't convince, but considering the options available to film makers - computer generated effects or practical effects - CGI was their only real option. Overall the graphics were quite impressive.

I don't remember the music at all. So clearly it didn't leave much of an impression which is a shame as I still catch myself humming Batman's tune from time to time. There's nothing like a good strong theme to help a superhero film.

Overall the cynic didn't speak to me much during the film and was over-powered by sheer entertainment value.