|
Fantastic Four July 10, 2005 |
||
|
Let me tell you about a movie that is warm, sweet, exciting, and funny, about a family of people blessed/cursed (depending on the outlook) with superpowers, who stick together despite the difficult social effects the powers have on their well being. One member of this family is a hulk of a person, able to lift cars and crush indestructible metal with ease; another can stretch like a rubber band, and yet another can create force fields and turn invisible at will, a power no doubt handy when ducking creditors and paparazzi. This wonderful family film of superheroes and humanism was last year’s big hit, “The Incredibles”, and I bring it back into play now because of a new film that is so familiar, and oh so bad, that it does me well to recall the greatness of the Pixar adventure, instead of remembering the new film, “Fantastic Four”, with all of its silly effects, poor dialogue, too perfect scenarios, and sloppy, ugly execution. The similarities are there for the picking: Mr. Incredible, the patriarch of the family, is comparable to “Fantastic Four’s” The Thing, except he’s still human, and The Thing is a big rock creature. Elastigirl, Mrs. Incredible, is the equivalent to the Marvel comic’s leader, Mr. Fantastic, whose only power is his stretching abilities. Invisible Incredible daughter Violet isn’t far off from the beautiful Sue Storm, and Human Torch Johnny Storm has the speed and spunk of the boy Incredible, Dash. That, and the Four fight an enemy who shoots lasers out of his fingers, not unlike Syndrome and his freeze ray in the earlier film, just a few of the coincidences that link the good to the bad. Imagine the meeting at 20th Century Fox the day after “The Incredibles” opened big last November, with such acclaim, as the dailies of the obviously weaker and clunkier “Fantastic Four” poured in with undeniable similarities; one studios masterpiece is another’s unfortunately timed retread. All is well now that “Fantastic Four” is making big money, and fans of the Marvel Comic will care not about a similarity with a Disney film, but all told, I’d rather see “The Incredibles” again and again, than have to sit through this junky cliché ridden tripe and it’s inevitable sequels. This new adaptation of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s 1961 classic suffers the usual comic book film boredom of watching regular humans turn into their powerful alter ego’s. It didn’t work all too well with “Batman Begins”, in my opinion anyway, or with “Hulk” a few years ago, and the main reason “Spider-Man 2” was so much better than the original was because we already had a defined hero, a complicated one at that, and no more messy How’s and Why’s to clog up the plot. In the case of the Fantastic Four, plus one villain, Dr. Doom, an out of control cosmic storm slams into their spaceship in outer space, and upon returning to Earth, they find their DNA has been altered to create unexplainable oddities. Johnny, Sue, and Reed Richards (Chris Evans, Jessica Alba, and Ioan Gruffudd, respectively) all fare pretty well, with cool new powers that can turn off and on at will, but unlucky Ben Grimm (Michael Chiklis, in a silly rubber suit) warps into a monster, granted an indestructible strong monster, but a monster nonetheless, whose supposedly caring wife leaves him with little hesitation, on a bridge, after he and his partners are outted as heroes. Ben is the films moralistic core, and poor Michael Chiklis, so good as Vic Mackey on “The Shield”, had to endure hours of makeup chair torture fitting into The Thing’s big orange body suit, cracking lame one-liners opposite Evans’ hot-headed Johnny Storm, and feeling sorry for himself at a local bar, where the only person who will pay him any time is the cute blind girl with a big bar tab. “Look at me,” he says to Sue Storm, “you have no idea what I’d give to be invisible.” Had the sound given out at that very moment, I would have still been able to see Jessica Alba in a revealing body suit, and not heard that golden Pulitzer Prize winning dialogue, but alas, it’s the price you pay when willfully attending a comic book film. “Fantastic Four” was directed by Tim Story, who apparently got the job based on the success of his first film, “Barbershop”, and not his last, “Taxi”, the Jimmy Fallon flop few saw, and fewer liked. It’s not a well-directed film, with so much attention paid to the cheesy effects that subtleties like plot and dialogue were sacrificed for the greater good of CGI perfection. The acting is mediocre at best, especially Alba, who may be a stone fox, but has years to go before her talent catches up with her beautiful body, and Ioan Gruffudd, whose Reed Richards is saddled with a love triangle involving Dr. Doom and Sue Storm so obvious and tedious a monkey pounding at a typewriter for ten minutes could have come up with something better. Let’s leave it at that, for such a ridiculous and funny image (picture it, money, typewriter, cigarette; it all works) is more entertaining, and, impending criticism cliché, fantastic than anything on screen in the boring, rather non-incredible “Fantastic Four”. by Adam Suraf “Fantastic Four” is playing at the Movie-Plex 59.
|