Even as a young foetus in the '70s, the Fantastic Four struck me as the least refined of Stan Lee’s comic creations. Now that’s really saying something. The Thing – a less impressively gangrenous ball of rage than The Hulk – was not without his primal charms, but the rest of the bunch always seemed a rather dull lot. As superheroes go, their respective powers – invisibility, brute strength and fire-starting – are hardly mind-blowing and, let’s face it, once you’ve de-limbed a Stretch Armstrong figure with a wrench, Mr. Fantastic’s bendy arms never seem all that fantastic again.
With no prior emotional attachment to the material and several subsequent decades worth of Great Leaps Forward in CGI, the movie could only be an improvement on the scratchy cartoon version of my youth, surely? Er, not quite. This vanilla account of the Fantastic Four’s genesis sees Five Go Up In A Spaceship and into the cosmic storm that transforms them into four benevolent freaks and one arch-nemesis. Back on earth, they battle it out in ways that conveniently showcase their unique new abilities until the revoltingly squeaky clean good guys triumph.
The special effects – pretty much all the movie has in its favour – are perfectly splashy and new but never particularly spectacular. All the eye-candy in the world just can’t make these guys as super as they ought to be. Sue Storm (Alba) disappears, brother Johnny (Evans) goes nova, The Thing (Chiklis) chucks cars about and Mr. Fantastic (Gruffudd) can scratch himself in whatsoever fashion he wishes. Impressed? M’eh, me neither.
In common with their quaint 1961 graphic counterparts, the entire exercise seems ludicrously antiquated; fictionalised Slavic sounding countries are name-dropped in a manner that has you wondering if the Cold War is back on and every character speaks dialogue that may have originated on an improving fridge magnet of some sort. As a modish gesture, the director has elected to add extreme sports and ESPN stardom to Johnny’s repertoire, an excruciating embellishment that entails an assault of nu-metal every time the character appears on screen.
To be fair, Fantastic Four isn’t going for the X-Men market; any potential for a radical, darksome reworking has been jettisoned in favour of no-brainer matinee frivolities. In this capacity at least, it’s better than last year’s Thunderbirds, but then again so is chlamydia.
Running Time 100 mins. Cert PG. Opens July 24