Fantastic Four (5/10)

by Tony Medley

Runtime 100 minutes.

OK for children.

Not being a comic book aficionado for lo, these many years, I’m not a fan of comic book movies. I never read the “Fantastic Four” comic books, so really know nothing about them except what I see in movies. And, so far, I’ve been singularly unimpressed.

However, this film tells how the Fantastic Four got their superpowers, so that part of the film is interesting because they all start out as relatively normal human beings. The story of what happened to them is unbelievable, but, hey, this is a comic book, so that’s OK.

The acting is good and the story is interesting enough to hold your interest. But then when they get to the fourth dimension, whatever that is, it becomes unwieldy. It’s one thing to get to this place and to get back and to have your natures changed by what happened there. OK, I’m willing to suspend disbelief for that. But to then continue and have them battle Armageddon, with a black hole, no less, well that completely lost me. From what I know about black holes (and they are still theoretical conjecture), they don’t look or act anything like this one.

Frankly, what these comic book movies do is to create an evil creature that is completely invulnerable and indestructible, and then go on to have it be destroyed. As a result, there is absolutely no tension in any of these films. They are generally little but special effects, ludicrous fights, and action.

Because of the birthing story, though, some of this film is pretty interesting. Alas, the last half hour, which is almost totally special effects warfare, left me cold.