A Marvelous Quartet

I am a little late in posting this, but this past Sunday I had the chance to go to the movies. Think what you will, but my choice was to go see “Fantastic Four.” Rotten Tomatoes didn’t give it a very enthusiastic rating, but I find that I have to take the genre and unusual nature of some movies into account when consulting RT. If a movie seems interesting and gets better than 20% I’ll consider seeing it. As I’ve said before (right before the review), I like looking into people’s imaginations, even if it may be their bad idea of a movie.

In all I was pleasantly surprised by the movie. I had hopes, from reading the positive reviews on RT. Sometimes you have to do that, because critics can be rather elitist about some things. Quite frankly I don’t want every movie I watch to be like Citizen Kane or Rear Window. Sometimes I just want to be entertained by a simple plot. Anyway, some of the acting seemed a little stiff, but then those characters were supposed to be stiff themselves, Mr. Fantastic and The Invisible Girl. The hot heads were played very well, The Human Torch and The Thing. Julian McMahon did a good job as Doom.

In superhero origin movies like this it can be hard to get a really good movie out of it. There is a lot of inflexibility in the story, and certain details have to be told. I think they did a pretty good job of adding the right amount of humor to ofset some of that. Most of the work to reverse their changes included enough personal interaction to learn about the characters, but it was still slow. Most of the actual action occured rather late in the movie. I concur with one of the positive reviews that when they finally come together as a team it kicks ass and makes you wanna yell, “Bring on the sequel, and make it more of that.”

If you liked Hellboy then you will probably find this movie enjoyable, but not quite to that level. I suggest a matinee or perhaps wait for a rental.