Fantastic Four
"Fantastic Four" is based on the Marvel Comics title that has lasted for more than 500 issues since its first appearance in 1961. But after watching this dramatically inert movie, you might assume its source was the cartoons of Hanna-Barbera.
This is not simply because one of the four is a hard-charging man-creature made entirely of scaly, orange rock. Nearly everybody in the film exists in an exasperating state of doofiness that makes Yogi Bear seem borderline existential.
The movie gets underway when four nice people head into outer space on a science experiment funded by a nasty, brilliant businessman and come back to New York City, having survived a gnarly cosmic storm that has altered their chemical compositions and physical appearances. Given how monotonous the characters are during the first 15 minutes, these would have to be changes for the better.
Dr. Reed Richards (Ioan Gruffudd) can now plasticize his body, making it expand and contort at will. His ex-girlfriend, Sue Storm (Jessica Alba), can create transparent, sometimes violent force fields and become invisible.
Sue's thrill-seeking brother Johnny (Chris Evans) can turn into flame. Their colleague Ben Grimm (Michael Chiklis) was closest to the storm, which transforms him into the aforementioned hulking, gruff-voiced Thing.
And that businessman, the extravagantly named Victor Von Doom (Julian McMahon), discovers he is made completely of titanium and will have to compete with Reed for Sue's attention.
What these mutations inspire is a bad superhero comedy that takes its time going nowhere. Much of it is centered around poor, pathetic Ben, who's depressed that his horrified wife has left him. In one sequence, he sits atop a bridge where a bird perches on him and relieves itself. Then he scares a suicidal man into oncoming traffic in an attempt to save him. That mishap provokes massive crashes and imperils bystanders whom Ben and friends rescue.
This is supposed to be a bravura sequence. Ben, for instance, stops an oncoming truck simply by letting it smash into him, the metal warping around his body. But the image is too familiar to be rousing. (Didn't the Hulk do the same thing? Didn't somebody in a ''Matrix" movie?) And the filmmakers fail to top it with a shot as remotely as exciting. Instead, the scene relies on jokes as flat as the acting by Gruffudd and Alba. When invisible Sue reappears in the scene wearing only her underwear, Reed observes, ''Wow, you've been working out!"
For a film about superheroes, ''Fantastic Four" gives its heroes nothing super to do. They wear fetching costumes and quite literally loaf around Reed's loft/megalab until the obligatory showdown with Dr. Doom, the masked electric storm Victor turns into. Reed, of course, wants everyone confined as he tries to reverse their ''infection" and make them ''normal" again.
The movie's problem is that these people were never all that interestingly human to begin with. That's partially an inherited problem. ''The Fantastic Four" was one of the more problematic series in the Marvel universe because its heroes were almost too ordinary. The four were mid-20th-century social archetypes jammed into a sort of makeshift dysfunctional family whose bond made the comic a knowing cross between a 1950s sitcom and a science-fiction B-picture. The title's creators, Jack Kirby and Stan Lee (who makes a cameo as a mailman), were experimenting by wedding divergent American themes (rebellion, elitism, heroism) and exploring the disharmony that ensued.
Roger Corman executive-produced a little-seen movie version of ''Fantastic Four" in 1994. It wasn't very good, but it did at least strive for the blend of cheesiness and emotional sincerity that made the comic interesting. Needless to say, that combination fails to surface in this newer version, which is a desperate bid for franchise status and not much else.
What the movie lacks most is a real sense of adventure. Any project starring people made of plastic, metal, fire, or rock should really be out exploring the erotic possibilities. New love for Ben comes in the form of the lovely Kerry Washington (''Ray"). Here she plays a blind woman, and while the pair are strangely sexy together, the movie moves on too fast.
The absence of psychological depth and visceral bang in ''Fantastic Four" makes you hungry both for ''The X-Men" and ''Spider-Man," two thrillingly perceptive Marvel-to-movie series, and for ''The Incredibles," a film that owes some of its family dynamic to Kirby and Lee's comic.
''Fantastic Four" lacks the wit and personality that fueled ''The Incredibles." The two credited screenwriters, Mark Frost and Michael France, don't fashion characters so much as models for a video game, and the director Tim Story, late of ''Barbershop" and the painfully dumb ''Taxi," seems too busy overseeing the effects and explosions to notice, for example, that the charismatic Evans wants to seize the occasion to become a star.
The actor is wasting his time. A movie as inconsequential as ''Fantastic Four" isn't worth stealing.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.
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