Fantastic Four (2005) Review

Fantastic Four (2005)

Fantastic Four follows four scientists, who, after an accident in space leaves them with powers, seek out a solution to return to normal. Another affected scientist however, has other, more nefarious plans. 

Remember what I said about Daredevil being better than you remember? Well, that is absolutely not the case with the first (“successful”) stab at bringing the Fantastic Four to the big screen. You’d think, with over 40 years of comics to draw from at this point, that a half feasible story would’ve been cooked up to shepherd them into the emerging world of superhero movies. Instead, we get a heartless “action” flick that goes through the motions without ever offering anything anywhere near profound, exciting, or even interesting. Thanks in part to its downright uninspired story, which consists of them getting their powers, spending an entire movie trying to get rid of said powers, only to follow it up with, “sure, let’s keep our powers” and defeat the bad guy who is bad for zero fucking reason. 

And speaking of our bad guy, they somehow managed to take Dr. Doom, one of the coolest and most powerful villains in all of Marvel comics and turn him into a weak sauce, glorified Scooby-Doo villain, with zero motivation other than ‘Reed stole his girl’. It’s pathetic really, and only contributed to the lackluster finale that lasted maybe, an entire 5 minutes. Every bit of decent storytelling was thrown out the window for silly banter, pointless antics, and an uneasy amount of unnecessarily sexual scenes including Sue, that felt tossed in just to get her naked. 

We get a horribly underutilized cast, starring Jessica Alba, Julian McMahon, Michael Chiklis, Ioan Gruffudd, and Chris Evans. Chiklis and Evans admittedly give great efforts and are the lone bright spots of this otherwise dismal movie. Gruffudd and Alba were given far too little to work with, and don’t even get me started on McMahon’s candy ass performance of Doom. 

Fantastic Four, directed by Tim Story, is a lazy, lackluster, and all around unenjoyable first stab at Marvel’s first family, with Story instead delivering an idiotic and soulless superhero flick that is so, so far from fantastic. 

4/10