Fantastic Four

It's time to take a break from the Baltic and discuss pop culture events. First off, it's only two days until the biggest event of the year - the San Diego Comic Book convention. This is the largest convention of it's kind in the world and it's not just about comics. Anything related to the larger world of comics, science fiction, fantasy, animation, anime, independent film, writing, television, movies, and fun can be found here. For more info: www.comic-con.org

To kick things off for the weekend, I thought I'd start getting caught up on movies.

When I was a kid, Fantastic Four was one of my favorite comics. I thought they were a cool group and I was always a bit freaked out by the Thing aka Ben. The movie trailer looked great and with the success of Spiderman and Batman, I had high hopes that FF would be a really fun movie. Sadly, while elements of the comic are there, and the visuals are good, the story just falls flat.

The movie spends so much time showing us how dysfunctional the four are, that it’s hard to care about what happens to them. Reed Richards is a wimp, Susan Storm a control freak, her brother Johnny Storm an idiot, and Ben Grimm, can fix other’s lives but not his own. The casting was a bit off, I didn’t buy Ioan Gruffudd as Lancelot in King Arthur and I don’t buy him as Reed Richards here. Jessica Alba who was great in Sin City is rather useless here, except as T&A for the guys.

The only saving graces are the performances by Julian McMahon as Dr. Doom and Michael Chiklas as Ben. They are both fun to watch and give life to their characters. It’s not enough to save the movie from itself though. We spend the first 90 minutes as set-up for the characters (most of which is watching special effects rather than a movie) and then the last 30 minutes there’s finally a showdown, team building, conflict and resolution.

All I can think of is that Comic Con is almost here and the FF production team has a lot to answer for. Poor Stan Lee has to face the crowd of let down comic fans and tell them why the movie sucked. Timing is everything. One can only hope that the box office take will be substantially less on week two than on week one, otherwise the studios will continue to give up crap.

The superhero movie to see this summer has been and still is, Batman Begins.

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