Fantastic 4
Starring: Starring: Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba
Directed by: Tim Story

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Rating: 2.5 (out of 5)

I'll be honest, after the first time I saw the trailer for this movie, I thought it was going to suck the sweat from Stan Lee's drooping nutsack. Not only did I bitch about it in my journal, but I managed to hoodwink good ol' Harry Knowles into letting me bitch about it on Ain't It Cool News.

"Why'd you drag ME into this, you little shit?"

Well, I guess the great folks at 20th Century Fox never read the reaming I gave them, otherwise they wouldn't have let me within 10 miles of the screening.

I almost hate to admit it, but when I saw the final product, I didn't hate it. I didn't LIKE it all that much, but I've got to admit that there were moments that I thoroughly enjoyed...despite the piss-poor dialogue, some truly horrific performances, terrible makeup, and plot holes big enough that Rosie O'Donnell could leap through them hitting nothing but net.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you "BrundleChiklis"

First of all, some education for all you FF newbies: This was the granddaddy of Marvel Comics. The popularity of Fantastic Four led to the creation of some of the greatest comic books of all time, including X-Men, Spider-Man, Daredevil, and about a million others. This isn't the first time they've been committed to film, either. Roger Corman produced a super-cheap version of it back in the early '90s that was never actually released. If you look hard enough, you can find bootlegs...and let me tell you, it is ABYSMAL.

This version...not as bad. Of course, that's like saying that a purple nurple isn't as bad as a good swift kick in the nuts, but still...

"Play a superhero? Well, it's a STRETCH! Ha ha! Get it?"

As the movie opens, we meet Reed Richards, super-genius (Gruffudd). He's in the company of his best friend, Ben Grimm (Michael Chiklis), and the two of them are on their way in to see Reed's old buddy Victor Von Doom (Julian McMahon). That's right...Victor Von DOOM. Okay, spot the bad guy! I'm not going to give anything away here, but if a guy's name is VON DOOM, the chances are pretty fucking good that if he's not already a bad guy, he will be soon. His name is DOOM, fer crissake.

Anyway, as it turns out, Reed is brilliant, but broke. He's trying to get a trip to space funded so he can study some cosmic cloud, or some such thing. He has no money to do it, so he asks Doom to fund it with his hat in his hand. See, Doom is a gazillionaire. Now let me ask you...if your name was DOOM, and you had more money than the Sultan of fucking Brunei, wouldn't you at least drop 50 bucks to legally change your name? Christ, he could change it to "Heywood Jablowme", and it would STILL sound better than DOOM. Change it to Victor Von PERKY, or Victor Von RAINBOW, or even Victor Von CUTE FLUFFY BUNNY. Anything but DOOM. Sheesh.

"If you cut me, do I not bleed? Hey...apparently not! Cool!"

Well, Doom agrees to fund the trip (to a space station that he owns, by the way), but he's got a few caveats. For starters, any practical applications that Reed discovers belong to him...Reed gets 25%, and Doom gets 75%. This, of course, explains why Reed's poorer than an Enron stockholder: he's retarded when it comes to business.

Also, he wants his "own people" on the mission as well. One of those is Sue Storm (Jessica Alba), Doom's "Director of Genetic Research". This is good news for all you young women who have humiliated yourselves appearing on "Girls Gone Wild" videos. You see, Sue is quite frankly dumber than a sack full of hammers, but her tits are out of this world (making her a prime candidate to go into space). I'm not kidding...she's supposed to be SMART, but through the entirety of the movie, she doesn't say the slightest thing that makes you think that she's gotten past the 4th grade. So, the lesson is that you can have a high position with a science-y sounding title, as long as you have killer funbags that are constantly sticking out of whatever you decide to wear. This just in: Pamela Anderson is the new head of NASA.

Alba, showing off her Fantastic 44s.

Oh, and Reed and Sue used to date, but now Sue's dating Victor Von Gel-hair. So using your cleavage as a cock-pipe for evil billionaires will get you places as well. I hope you're taking notes, kids!

The pilot on the mission is Sue's "younger" brother Johnny (Chris Evans). Here's some fun trivia...Evans is SIX WEEKS younger than Alba. But whatever. I guess their parents had super-powered sperm and ova. The fifth wheel, of course, is Victor Von Hello Kitty himself. Of course, I can't honestly blame him. If I were a billionaire with my own space station, I'd be going up there whenever I could, just because hey...it's space!

Here's a tip for you...if you're getting a "burning sensation" when you urinate, try to avoid pissing on your hand.

They get up there, and it turns out that this "cosmic storm" that they're supposed to be studying is arriving about 7 hours ahead of schedule. This is the part of the movie where the whole "Reed's a super-genius" thing went right out of the fucking window for me. It's never explained WHY the storm arrives early...it just DOES, and Reed doesn't know why. What pisses me off that after launches, trips through space, and bickering on the Victor Von Unicorn space station, he never even so much as LOOKED AT AN INSTRUMENT to realize this. He waits until Ben is outside the space station to even so much as glance at a dial. That's our super-genius.

So the storm arrives, and causes no end of problems for the crew of the Minnow here. Most tellingly, it interrupts the poon-struck Victor Von Puppydog as he's proposing to Sue.

I don't know who looks dumber...the blonde bimbettes gawking at him, or those 2 guys in back gawking at him.

Next thing you know, they're all back on earth, in quarantine, in a hospital. Since the bunch of them were knocked out for DAYS because of the storm, we actually don't know how they got there. But that's a question for a smarter movie to answer. Maybe HAL brought them back. Who knows, and quite frankly, who cares?

But since they were exposed to cosmic rays or whatever, it turns out that they've all had their DNA altered (although in Sue's case, I get the feeling that she had so much "genetic research" IN her that it all just got confused somewhere around her fallopian tubes). See, now Reed can stretch longer than the elastic on Star Jones' panties. Sue can turn invisible, hiding the only 2 things she has going for her. Johnny can turn into flame, but just in case anyone wants to make "flamer" jokes about him, he's an extreme-sports-loving poon hound. And Ben...well, he apparently mutates to the point where he's made of rocks...when in fact he's clearly made of Nerf. Seriously...his REAL superpower would be the ability to punch a 6-year-old in the eye without leaving so much as a bruise. That's 4 people, 4 powers, 4 heroes...hence, the Fantastic 4.

Any minute, they're going to break into a rousing rendition of YMCA.

"But wait," you're screaming, "There were FIVE of them!" Very observant. At this point, I'll remind you that the mission's Door Number 5 is saddled with the moniker Victor Von DOOM! With a name like that, he HAS to be evil, especially when one of the heroes is named GRIMM. It's really the only way it could have turned out. Oh, if only he'd changed his name to Victor Von Chipper.

Doom goes nuts, while the "heroes" try to deal with the fact that they have powers. This includes several scenes of Sue stripping naked in public so her clothes aren't visible when she's invisible. And because there will be a lot of teenage boys seeing this movie, you KNOW that she winds up "visible" at least once in her bra and panties, presumably purchased in the "scientist" section of Victoria's Secret. Yet another reason why your "Girls Gone Wild" experience could help you in later life.

I know where I'd put MY test tube...

An aside: In fact, I'm encouraging all of my young readers to "Go wild" and list that as "experience" on their resumes. Then send the resume to me, with photographic proof of the fact that you have, in fact, gone "wild". I will then examine your resume and photos and let you know if you have a chance to become a super-hero who could also be the Director of Genetic Research for a huge, evil corporation. Plus that way I'll get to see me some boobies.

Good fights evil, the heroes have issues, yadda yadda yadda.

And yet, I didn't HATE the movie.

"...it doesn't take much to see that the problems of Nerf-covered genetic mutants don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world..."

Honestly, it's really not very good. The dialogue is the worst I've heard since Attack Of The Clones. The fact that the supposedly injured astronauts somehow find their way back to Earth whist unconscious is merely the first of about 6 plot points that make no sense whatsoever. A lot of them could be considered "spoilers", so I won't discuss them. But really, the only reason that they ARE spoilers is that anyone with an education above the 5th grade can realize that these developments make no sense.

There is one thing that I will discuss though...Ben (The Thing) lives in Brooklyn. As you'll recall, he's been turned into a giant Nerf monster. He's revolted...as well he should be. Not because he looks HIDEOUS, but because he looks like a tool. So he runs ON FOOT from the hospital (which is somewhere with kickass mountains and ski hills, as evidenced by Johnny's hot dog snowboarding with a slutty nurse) to Brooklyn THAT DAY. And yet, that's not even the retarded part.

"IT'S CLOBBERIN' TIME! And by clobber, I mean I'm going to pound you with my light, spongy fists until you giggle yourself to death!"

The RETARDED part is that when he gets to Brooklyn, he calls his fiancée Debbie (Laurie Holden) from a phone booth outside their place and asks her to meet him outside...what with him being ashamed of his appearance at all. She doesn't know this, so she comes running out into the MIDDLE OF THE BROOKLYN STREETS wearing her goddamn NIGHTIE.

Look, I'm sorry for what I'm about to say, but that's the stupidest thing a woman has ever done in the history of movies...and I'm including Adult Movies here. I mean KEE-RIST, why not just staple a sign to your vagina that says "Victim here!" Don't write me angry emails...I'd never even SUGGEST that a woman deserves to be assaulted. However, going out in public in the middle of the night wearing lingerie is just a STUPID THING TO DO. I can't be the only person who thinks so.

"Are you SURE that this is Mark McGwire's sample? Because something doesn't look right here."

And yet, it's not an altogether useless part of the movie. See, she reacts with horror, and even after Ben becomes a hero, she's revolted by him, so she rejects him. As dumb as the previous stuff is, you KNOW that's gotta hurt. And that becomes the basis of Ben's character...the reluctant, ashamed, revolting Nerf hero. For the most part, the movie handles this aspect to the whole "super-hero" thing quite well...especially Ben.

As much as he looks like a tool, Chiklis is actually one of the best things in the movie. The part could have been played with the same single dimension as some of the other actors (particularly Alba and McMahon) but it isn't. Chiklis really does a great job about making us care about the guy BENEATH the Nerf. I was very impressed.

"FLAME ON it's a crazy feeling, and I know it's got me reeling..."

I was also pretty impressed with Evans as the hot-headed, fame-loving Human Torch. I've never liked much that this kid has done, but I thought he and Chiklis pretty much owned the movie. It helps that their characters are always at each other's throats...they play well off each other. Meanwhile, Gruffudd is...well, he's decent but unremarkable. But that's exactly what the character has been like for over 40 years in comic books, so I liked that as well.

Alba's either an idiot in real life, or she made a decision to play this supposed "scientist" as a vapid moron. In any case, I was glad that she was invisible half the time. It improved her performance. Meanwhile, McMahon (who's usually a pretty good actor) is the WORST super-villain I've ever seen. Villians should be either charismatic or bone-crushingly evil...or both. He's neither...he's an accountant gone bad. Boring, boring, BORING.

"Mr. Fantastic" prepares to get himself a nice handful...and I've gotta be honest, I don't really blame him.

What I DID like was that they were reluctant heroes who just really got on each others' nerves a lot. There are some genuinely funny moments in the movie, borne of different kinds of tension. I thought these moments helped move it along nicely...except when things get "romantic" or "heavy". At these moments, I was fondly remembering Anikin's speech about how he doesn't like sand. Yes, it's that bad.

I trashed the effects a few months ago, and as it turns out, I was premature. Yes, The Thing looks like Nerf. But a lot of the other effects look pretty good. The Human Torch in particular actually looks pretty cool. Plus a lot of the fight scenes, including the protracted one between The Thing and Victor Von Care Bear, are pretty entertaining...although I don't know how The Thing gets out of the swimming pool...as I recall, Nerf is super-absorbent.

Basically, for everything I enjoyed, there was something that I hated. I guess that means that they cancel each other out. By my logic, that means that the movie doesn't actually exist in any way that I can give a strong opinion on it. Sadly, that flawed logic is sounder than the logic in the movie. I guess it is what it is: a fluffy, goofy superhero movie that's impressive at times, and just damn stupid at others.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to legally change my name. I want to become "Victor Von Butterfly" before that Doom bastard beats me to it.

"That's DOCTOR BUTTERFLY to you!"

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