Summer Filmic Gorging, Week 3

There never was a formal review of the Fantastic Four movie on the blog. With good reason maybe. I'll run down the pros and cons real quick.

The great parts of the movie were indeed the action, the interaction of the characters, and some of the effects. Michael Chiklis as the Thing and Chris Evans as Johnny Storm really stood out in my mind as two of the bright spots acting-wise. I would have loved Julian McMahon as Victor Von Doom in another capacity, but he did give a good performance with what he was given. Effects-wise, there are things they could have improved upon, but with the impacted release schedule it was impressive. I look forward to seeing improvement with the sequel.

Now for the negatives. Well, there was one big negative as I saw it, this movie could have been much bigger in scope than it was. I mean, Dr. Doom goes crazy and that's the climax? The team saves a fire truck and they're instant heroes? It's very much unlike Spider-man's premise in that he becomes an established hero over the course of the movie, while during this film, the four pretty much hangs out in the Baxter Building until Doom tries to destroy them. Where's the large cosmic scale, the world-domination plots from Doom, or even a haphazard appearance of the Impossible Man? I guess that's why so many people left the project before it started: not enough focus, and not enough depth. In the end, the movie wasn't trying to be deep, but trying to be fun. In this essence, they succeeded, but will have to really try much harder to establish their own world if a sequel is to succeed.

Unimaginably, I enjoyed the movie a bit. See it as a matinee if you must, it's a fun piece of popcorn fluff.

Overall score: 2.5 out of 5 stars