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Review:
 Remakes
that are better than the original film are very rare indeed.
This is one of them, although there are extenuating circumstances
here. The original in this case was one of the worst movies of all
time, a film so atrocious that it was never released. A
straight-to-bootleg horror so bad it's legendary.
That's the good news.
The bad news is that this isn't particularly good either. Michael
France and Mark Frost's screenplay is one of the lamest in this
year of lame scripts, and Tim Story is batting about .400 as a
director. He did “Barber Shop” and it's good sequel, but that's no
reason to do anything like this.
The “Fantastic Four” was the first Marvel® comic(Yeah, I know
“Captain America” and the “Submariner” dated back to World War II,
but that was Timely who went out of business a decade before Stan
Lee bought the rights to them) Creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby
wanted to do something different. A bunch of superheroes without
costumes and secret identities. The thing failed miserably, so Lee
and Kirby gave them costumes. Thereafter it was a hit, at least
until DC got it's act together at the end of the sixties. People
of a certain age remember it as an intelligent book from their
childhood. The problem was the origin story was perfunctory and
dumb, something that Marvel didn't dwell on very much.
So that's what they decided to concentrate the plot of the movie
on.
The film opens with Reed Richards(Ioan Gruffudd) and his best pal
Ben Grimm (Michael Chiklis) convincing mogal Victor Von Doom
(Julian McMahon) to let them go up to Vic's space station and do
research on how cosmic rays affect genetics. Vic agrees on the
proviso that he goes up too and can take his girlfriend Sue Storm
(Jessica Alba), who just happens to be Reed's ex-girlfriend.
She'll only go if she can bring her baby brother Johhny(Chris
Evans), who's a former test pilot. Everybody knew each other back
in the day it seems.
The whole thing is extremely silly. What made the book readable
back when I was a kid were the two things: The Thing was full of
angst, and on rare occasions he would fight the Incredible Hulk.
[The Hulk vs. Thing strength comparison was up there with 'Can
Superman beat God' in the cosmic question category until we
discovered girls growing tits], but aside from that there was
nothing resembling character development [that came after I hit
puberty].
Anyway…the five are in the space station when the cosmic storm
hits several hours early and the five get zapped. They get back to
earth and get their superpowers. Vic turns into metal and plots
revenge. But at least the action is well done
The acting is mediocre except for Mike Chiklis in tons of latex
makeup. He's got angst and everybody else is a cipher, although
Chris Evens appears to be enjoying himself. They should never have
made this film.
Eric Lurio
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