 Most critics have concluded that The Fantastic Four is something less than fantastic. "Underwhelming," is how Roger Ebert describes the movie in the Chicago Sun-Times. He concludes: "The really good superhero movies, like Superman, Spider-Man 2 and Batman Begins, leave Fantastic Four so far behind that the movie should almost be ashamed to show itself in the same theaters." Steven Rea in the Philadelphia Inquirer is harsher, commenting: "Lacking wit, lacking style, and just plain lacking, Fantastic Four offers a series of noisy confrontations, ho-hum special effects, and a post-action-scene mantra repeated ad nauseam: One of the Fantastics, dusting off debris, checks with another and inquires, 'Are you OK?'" Lou Lumenick in the New York Post is harsher still, describing the film as "the smelliest dead-on-arrival would-be franchise since The Hulk. A perfect storm of wooden acting, hackneyed direction, inane scripting and laughably cartoonish special effects." On the other hand A.O. Scott in the New York Times apparently has concluded that all of that was intentional. "In an era when movies based on comic books have become increasingly solemn and serious, this one is content to be trashy," he writes. Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post calls it "a funky, fun film version of the famous Marvel superhero concoction." And Glenn Whipp in the Los Angeles Daily News takes a middle position -- calling it "neither here nor there." So does Geoff Pevere in the Toronto Star, who remarks: "Because `The So-So Four' would never do for a quartet of weirdly gifted comic-legend superheroes, The Fantastic Four is somewhat misnamed. Fantastic it ain't, but not bad it sort of is." |
