filkertom | Fantastic Four (Reply)

Good gravy, the thing was actually watchable.

Let me rephrase that. The Thing, played under a mountain of rubber by Michael Chilkis, was absolutely my Ben Grimm from the comics. And Chris Evans was perfect as Johnny Storm.

Ioan Gruffudd is okay to good as Reed Richards, and Jessica Alba is good to pretty darn good as Sue Storm (although she suffers from Daryl Hannah In Roxanne Disease -- that incredibly young cupcake is the head of a major corporation's Human Genome Research Dept.? Sh-yeah, right). But the Thing and the Torch are spot-on, character-wise. I have some complaints about the rubber rather than brick-like look of the Thing suit... but Chilkis made me forget.

And, frankly, the movie those guys are in is pretty good, too. Compelling stuff about the different ways of dealing with having that kind of thing happen to you. Johnny takes his love of extreme sports up a couple of levels, becoming wildly popular; Reed looks for a cure; Sue tries to rekindle things with Reed; Ben wanders alone, looking for... anything. Lots of good scenes, with just about the right level of superheroics for an origin film, and lots of nice character touches. Kerry Washington is sweet as Alicia Masters (and I love the bartender -- "'Ey! Ben Grimm is the first mook from Brooklyn to go to outer space! Show a little respect"). And there's an adorable cameo by Stan Lee as Willie Lumpkin.

Unfortunately, there's someone else in the movie... or, rather, in a different movie apparently grafted into this one.

Julian McMahon as Victor Von Doom is so dull, so wrong that I wanted every scene with him to end dammit end so we could get back to the more interesting movie. The extensive changes they inflicted upon the monarch of Latveria are pretty much all bad. They threw in a couple of bones about him being from Latveria, but none of them really work. I want to smack the scriptwriters for getting so much right and this one big thing wrong.

So, if you're an FF fan who's been avoiding this, by all means go see it for the FF. (Don't pay full price if you can help it, but you won't be that badly ripped off if you do.) But mark my words, inferiors... the rightful ruler of this undeserving mudball, Doctor Doom, shall have his day.