From the files of "Why Natalie never goes to the movies at the theatre unless she knows it will kick ass".
Warning: Spoiler, if it can be called that, ahead. Don't read this and then bitch I ruined it for you. Also, this is for Entertainment Purposes ONLY - please don't feel a need to explain the comic to me, and why they did this and this and this. You can go AWOL on an original comic and still make a good movie.
So Saturday evening I had plans to see "Batman Begins". I have it on good authority that this movie is supposed to completely rock. Unfortunately it was sold out. Should've bought the tickets before dinner, I suppose. But I was so happy to be going to eat at P.F. Chang's, I didn't think of it. The meal, incidentally, DID rock and the waitress was super cool. Anyway.
So Batman is sold out (after four weeks of being out, it HAS to kick ass) so we decide to take a chance on The Fantastic Four, or "We Got Stan Lee to Sign Off On The Script Because He'd Just Had Surgery and Was Groggy". I admit the movie was entertaining and amusing, but it just still was bad.
Our movie starts off with two hopeful science geeks, Reed and Ben, visiting an old classmate, from MIT, to ask for money. They say that Victor (Von Doom, can you guess who will be the bad guy in this movie?) is a billionaire from the fast-food/strip mall industry. Because I'm sure anyone who goes to MIT dreams of a career in fast food. For some reason they have been rejected by NASA and have no money, but there's this specific time in space they need to go up and do DNA and genetics testing. They want him to finance it, and to borrow his space station. I can see that, because if I was a billionaire, I would have a space station too. He takes this opportunity to of course cut the guys down because they're poor, and to introduce his Director of Genetics Research, Susan Storm. Of course she is played by Jessica Alba and of course she is Reed's old girlfriend and they parted on the worst of terms so there's tension. Von Doom generously agrees to finance the expedition, and Sue recruits her brother Johnny to be the pilot. Johnny is cute and dumb and has no manners whatsoever, but I still enjoy his character. And I think Johnny Storm is a great name for a superhero. I'm not buying that he worked for NASA, however. So the five set off for space in their clingy space suits. They are up there maybe five minutes before they encounter a freak radiation storm that was supposed to be nine HOURS away, not nine minutes. They are all smacked by the radiation, Ben getting the worst of it, yet they all survive. Naturally within a few days they all have superpowers.
Reed - becomes Elasti-man, or "Mr. Fantastic". He can stretch.
Sue - Can become invisible, and also throw a power shield up against other elements. That would be cool if they didn't make her take such a stupid pose when she does it.
Johnny - can engulf himself in flames and maybe fly.
Ben - becomes walking pile of stone, extremely strong
Victor - insides start turning to metal. And for some non-explained reason, he loses two clumps of hair.
Johnny is like I would be - thrilled to discover it, and trying to figure out what I could do with them. There's a laughable snowboarding scene with his cute nurse and an even more WTF? Motorbike scene and he picks on Ben who has turned into a large walking pile of rocks and been dumped by his beautiful blonde fiance. There are two - count em, two - scenes in which Sue is out in public and needs to use her invisibility powers. But! Only her skin will be invisible, not her clothes, so she has to strip, twice. I think that might have been the bargaining tool with ol' Stan also. "We'll let you keep the mistake reels of Jessica". She did a decent acting job and she looked good, except she was very bronze and her hair was very bronze also, giving her a slightly jaundiced look. Also, she had on so many false eyelashes she looked like Tammy Faye Bakker. She's naturally pretty, they should've just left good enough alone.
Anyway.
So of course, she and Reed are working out why they broke up and who broke up with whom; Ben is battling feelings of resentfulness and Von Doom is turning evyl. He gets dumped by his bank because of all the money lost from the space experiment and of course becomes bitter and angry. My question is, if you made your money in fast food, how could your stock fall from a space experiment gone wrong where nobody even DIED? its not like people are going to stop going to the drive thru window on account of that. They keep suggesting he go back to Latveria, I'm guessing his home country? There are maybe two places in the movie he speaks with any hint of an accent - most of the time it's "You don't wanna make me mad, do ya??" Reed is building a machine that will either cure them all or make their symptoms worse. It all sort of blurs together although I very much enjoyed when Ben smashed up Johnny's porsche and threw it at him. We also got a nice lesson on not judging people by their looks, when Ben meets a pretty, blind, black lady in a bar who hits on him and cheers him up. Ben then gets reversed to his normal self with the help of Victor who convinces him that Reed and Sue are too busy gettin' jiggy wid it to help him return to his old self.
Now comes the final battle scenes with Victor ("Call me - DOOM") which last maybe a total of five minutes all combined. It was just too easy to defeat him. Everyone knows the final fight scenes ought to last at least 15 minutes, and have one betrayal come out and the bad guy needs to escape two or three times. Not in this movie! All we need is for Johnny to engulf the guy in flames, then Ben breaks open a water hydrant. Hot metal cooled off quickly-they'd been taunting each other with questions from High School Chemistry thru the whole movie. They're all in their "these are not costumes" space suits that now have a 4 on them. And Ben, in his pants and belt, now has a belt buckle with a silver 4 on it, since he can't wear clothes. When he stopped by Tiffany's to get that, in between Victor's apartment and the street fight, I'm not sure. Then we cut to a party being thrown for the Fantastic Four. A thank-you party, although not sure what for. All they did was get rid of the guy who hated THEM, and tear up the streets of New York. Reed gives a dippy proposal to Sue; Ben has hooked up with the blind lady; and DOOM is on his way back to Latveria courtesy of his 12 year old assistant. Then, in the gayest superhero movie moment EVER, Johnny bolts off the boat where the party is, and cuts a huge fiery 4 into the night sky.
I don't claim to be an expert on the FF, but I know this was even more painful for people who ARE. I can see where some would be entertained by it though - I was, at times....
