‘Fantastic Four’: THR’s 2005 Review
On July 8, 2005, 20th Century Fox brought the Fantastic Four to the big screen, launching the Marvel superheroes to a $330 million worldwide gross and a quickly greenlit sequel. The Hollywood Reporter’s original review of the Tim Story-directed film is below:
Given the sheer number of screenwriters and directors who have come and gone along the way, the comic book-to-motion picture journey taken by Fantastic Four has been fraught with enough obstacles to make that DNA altering cosmic radiation storm encountered by the Marvel superheroes look like a gentle breeze by comparison.
Now, 44 years after the quartet made its comic book debut, Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Woman, Human Torch and the Thing arrive on the big screen courtesy of a script officially credited to Mark Frost and Michael France, direction by Tim Story and about 800 visual effects shots.
And the result? Fantastic Four‘s a colossal snore.
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After all the fussing and fidgeting exerted in trying to nail just the right mix of comic book action, comedy and pathos, the movie emerges as a tone-deaf mishmash of underdeveloped characters, half-baked humor and unhatched plotting drenched in CGI overkill.
Boxoffice-wise, the 20th Century Fox release probably will be an improvement over the considerably less-than-Marvel-ous welcome afforded Elektra and The Punisher, but there’s an overriding ’90s syndicated TV look and feel to this shot-in-Vancouver production that could have the core comic book geek contingent voting to hold out for the DVD.
Director Story — whose studio credits, the hit Barbershop and the decidedly nonhit Taxi, wouldn’t exactly indicate a convincing affinity for the material — seems to go flat from the very start.
That would be when scientist-inventor Dr. Reed Richards (loan Gruffiidd) embarks on an outerspace mission having something to do with unlocking the secrets of human genetic codes, financed by his old college rival, billionaire industrialist Victor Von Doom (Julian McMahon).
They’re joined on the trip by Reed’s best buddy, astronaut Ben Grimm (Michael Chiklis); ex-girlfriend Sue Storm (Jessica Alba), who’s now Von Doom’s director of research; as well as Sue’s hotshot younger brother, Johnny (Chris Evans). But as the result of a miscalculation, their space station gets zapped by radioactive turbulence that alters each crew member’s DNA in remarkably different ways.
Reed turns into a human Gumby, able to stretch and contort his body however he pleases; Sue is able to simultaneously project force fields and render herself invisible provided she sheds all her clothing; Johnny has the capacity for spontaneous combustion; and poor Ben’s body mass index goes berserk, rendering him into a hulking rock formation of a tough guy.
As for the iron-fisted, steely eyed Von Doom, he literally turns iron-fisted and steely eyed, with the fitting ability to feed off the city’s power supply.
But once they become known as the Fantastic Four, neither Story nor any of the writers who took a crack at the script seem to have figured out where to go next in terms of both an overall tone and discernible visual style.
Lacking the strong creative imprint of a Sam Raimi or a Bryan Singer, the film fails to capture the comic book essence achieved by the Spider-Man and X-Men movies. The characters, with the exception of Evans’ limelight-basking Human Torch and Chiklis’ empathetic Thing, are blandly underwritten and anemically interpreted.
There are the occasional glimpses of the sort of fun Jack Kirby and Stan Lee had in mind when they cooked up their dysfunctional family of mainly reluctant superheroes, but they’re few and far between, clobbered by a barrage of effects that frankly wouldn’t have cut it a decade ago on the Sci Fi Channel and composer John Ottman’s uncharacteristically cacophonous score. — Michael Rechtshaffen, originally published on July 8, 2005.
