Poop Shute

Fantastic Four Review

BEWARE SPOILERS!!

Trivia question: What do you get when you take a bad script, have a bad direct spearhead, miscast the lead female and villain and puff it up with a bloated special effects budget? If you hadn't already guessed it, the answer is the Fantastic Four. I have never been a fan of this particular comic book, but I am a big comic book fan in general. Any comic book junkie knows the basics of The Four's story.

This movie ain't it.

In the movie Dr. Doom and Reed Richards are old college science rivals. Wuh? Doom is also on the ship with them in the cosmic storm? Ben becomes human again... and goes back to being The Thing by choice? Dr. Doom is the CEO of a Fortune 500 company in New York instead of a tyrant in a fictional eastern european country? AND he can shoot lightning beams out of his hands?

There's also the abounding continuity errors and meandering storyline of The Four coming into their powers. It's 45 minutes in before they have their powers and about an hour in before we even have a clearly defined villain. And even once Victor is clearly the villain, his motivation for evil is revenge on Reed? What? Not taking over the world, but petty vengence? That doesn't sound very Dr. Doom-like.

Then there's the dialogue. There's one point when Doom has Reed locked in a chair and hooked up to a "hyper cooling unit" (whatever the hell that is) and he asks the following:

Doom: Chem 101 question for you, Reed. What happens to rubber when it's super-cooled?

Chem 101? Well, if those demonstrations from sixth-freaking grade taught me anything, they taught me that when you dip a rubber ball into liquid nitrogen and try to bounce it... it breaks. Reed gets frozen, but of course, Sue saves the day and we never get to see Reeds brittle ass break... but why wouldn't the freezing alone kill him? He's bendy, but still human. There was frost on his face. He was blue. BUT then again, a cosmic storm made him a rubber man, so whatever. I'll let that go.

Then at the end Human Torch uses his flame ability to superheat Doom during the climactic fight scene. Like with Reed, the heat is enough to make him glow orange, but not kill him. Okay, whatever. Then Reed cleverly turns Doom's own witty dialogue against him.

Doom: That's the best you've got? A little heat?

Reed: Chem 101 question Vic. What happens when super-heated metal is rapidly cooled?

His one liner is punctuated by Thing kicking open a fire hydrant and aiming it at Doom.

Now, if that time when I was a kid and I put a very hot pot from the stove into the cold tap water taught me anything, it taught me that super heated metal BREAKS when rapidly cooled. So, at this point in the movie I'm expecting to see Doom break into little pieces or at least get all bent and warped or somthing. Cool, right? It would have been, but that isn't what we got. When the steam cloud clears there's Doom frozen in place like a perfect statue. Anticlimactic as all hell, but I see why. They need him for a sequal seeing as how the Fantastic Four don't really have any other good villains.

Lastly, the casting was actually great... except for Doom and Sue. I like both actors a great deal, but neither one was right for their role. Jessica Alba is too sexual to be Sue. In her defense she can't help being so sexual, it oozes off of her, but nevertheless, she is no Sue Richards. If we're talking Gilligan's island here, Suzie is a wholesome chick like Maryanne, and Alba is totally Ginger. Julian Mcmahon is a handsome guy and a fine actor, but his voice and presence are too soft for Doom. I need menace from Doom, not Mcmahon's odd brand of charm.

1 out of 5 Poops

And they got that 1 poop only because of all the great cleavage shots of Jessica Alba.