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The Fantastic Four

Yep, it's the summer, so it's yet another movie based on a comic book. We've already had Batman Begins, Sin City and Constantine this year. We've still got V for Vendetta, more sequels to X-Men and Spider-man, plus a revival of the Superman franchise to look forward to over the coming months. Not to mention countless other comic book projects which are currently chugging their way through the Hollywood pipeline to cash in on the superhero genre's successes of recent years.

Spot the odd one out.

For those unfamiliar with this particular superhero team, the Fantastic Four bear little resemblance to Enid Blyton's Famous Five or Secret Seven beyond their hobby of occasionally trying to thwart crimes. There are few lashings of ginger beer. It's more lashings of over-the-top action and special effects.

The "four" are boyfriend and girlfriend astronauts-cum-scientists Reed Richards and Susan Storm, plus Susan's brother Johnny and their fellow astronaut Ben Grimm.
On a jaunt into space they run into the usual comic book disaster, which leaves them all with superpowers.

Reed is able to stretch his body, Susan to become invisible and create force fields, Johnny to fly and turn into a human fireball, and Ben gets the raw deal of turning into a hulking, super-strong lump of orange rock.With the exception of Human Torch Johnny, you might think that these powers are lacking somewhat. You'd be right. The Fantastic Four have always been a little bit stupid – no cool claws like Wolverine, no webslinging like Spider-man, no laser eyes like Superman, and no dark psychological problems like Batman.

Ben Grimm's transformation into The Thing makes him little more than a slightly more articulate orange version of The Incredible Hulk, while Reed's stretching ability is simply silly and Susan's invisibility-cum-mild telepathy is neither useful or impressive.
And then we've got the Four's arch-enemy, the rather dumb sounding Victor Von Doom who, unsurprisingly with a name like that, is a metal-clad supervillain with the rather unimaginative moniker of Doctor Doom.

The usual battles and fights and the like ensue. To add insult to silly premise injury, they've even messed around with the characters a bit, ensuring that fans of the comics are up in arms. To be fair director Tim Story, the man behind comedy hit Barbershop, makes the best of a bad premise, but with such incredibly uninspiring characters to work with, the cast – of whom Ioan Gruffudd and Jessica Alba as Reed and Susan are probably the best known – does little but struggle.

The special effects are, as with most films these days, pretty good, but somewhat let down by the decision for The Thing to be portrayed by a man in a prosthetic bodysuit rather than CGI. This makes him rather less impressive-looking than he could have been if had they made him a tad bigger and more agile.

In short, certainly not the best comic book adaptation to date. But it's still by no means terrible. If you fancy a silly slice of sci-fi, this will while away a couple of hours fairly happily.