Following the non-release of this film (and, one suspects, the success of the X-Men and Spiderman films later in the decade), Eichinger and Stan Lee mended their fences and decided to give the whole thing another go with 20th Century Fox picking up the option for giving the Fantastic Four an official reboot. A decent looking cast was assembled with Ioan Gruffadd signed up to play Mr Fantastic, Michael Chiklis as the Thing, Julian McMahon as Dr Doom, Jessica Alba as Sue Storm and Chris Evans as Jonny Storm. Despite mixed-to-negative critical reviews, the film was a box office success and did well enough to lead to a sequel being given the green light. However, with the giant steps Marvel films began to take a couple of years later with the MCU, it's generally regarded these days as being towards the bottom end of the Marvel films league in terms of quality. Justified or not? Hey, that's what we're here to find out...
The film begins with Reed Richards and Ben Grimm meeting up with their old college friend Victor Von Doom. The pair are looking for funding for a mission to observe a cosmic cloud which is believed to be able to trigger evolution. However, both of them are skint as none of their research has ever made them any money while Victor has been a bit more successful in investing in the right projects and is now the head of a multinational research company. He agrees to let the pair use his space station to observe the storm in return for 75% of the profits from the mission.
Von Doom also insists that two of his team of researchers, brother and sister Jonny and Susan Storm, go along on the mission. We find out that Sue and Reed used to be a couple but she subsequently left him for the more successful and less nerdy Victor. Jonny, meanwhile, is a NASA dropout who was thrown out of the space corps for being too much of a slacker and his commanding officer while he was there was Ben. So, safe to say, plenty of tension.
The team arrive on the space station and set up the equipment to monitor only for the storm to unexpectedly arrive six hours early while Ben is still outside the space station. The team rush to rescue him and manage to pull him back in but the cosmic radiation enters the building and knocks out everyone apart from Victor who manages to pull the shields up around the central core just in time. He pilots the ship back to earth and gets the rest of the team admitted to hospital.
Surprisingly, all four of the team make a recovery but it's clear that everything is not as it seems. Jonny decides to take one of the nurses out on a date snowboarding at the resort next to the hospital only to turn into a human fireball midway through a jump. Meanwhile, Reed, Sue and Ben go to a restaurant only for Sue to suddenly become invisible midway through the meal and Reed to discover his limbs extend when he goes to stop a wine bottle falling off a table!
Ben, meanwhile, doesn't feel well and goes back to his quarters where he turns into the rock-man that we all know as The Thing. The others, upon realising something is wrong, go to find him (with Reed using his limbs to reach under and unlock the door) only to discover he's already busted out of the facility to go home. However, when he returns to New York his wife Debs rejects him.
Disappointed, Ben goes to sit on top of the Brooklyn Bridge to ponder what to do next. However, his appearance distracts a guy who had gone to commit suicide who runs into the traffic and causes a pile-up with a fire engine left hanging off the bridge! The other three quarters of the team turn up and manage to avert the disaster by using their superpowers leading to them becoming heroes to the people of New York and christened the Fantastic Four.
Unbeknownst to the team, Victor has also been affected by the radiation and has seen his company's value wiped out by the bad publicity surrounding the accident with the bank stepping in to repossess it. His skin is slowly turning into metal (including a scar on his face from the explosion on the face station) and he is able to shoot out bolts of lightning from his hands. And also, he's going slowly insane and intent on destroying all those who've contributed to his misfortune including Reed Richards.
Realising that they can't be seen out in public until they've cured themselves, the team bunker up in Reed's lab to try and work on a cure. Or rather, two of them do. Jonny is keen to get all the publicity he can get from his new powers and after he enters a motocross championship on live TV and cuts a suitably boneheaded promo about the Fantastic Four and their nicknames afterwards, it drives a wedge between him and the others especially Grimm and the two come to blows before storming off. Ben has also been starting to feel like a spare wheel in the team, especially with Reed and Sue slowly rekindling their romance and ends up splitting his time between drinking in bars (where he meets Alicia, a blind woman who takes sympathy on him) and meeting up with Victor (who's severed his ties with the rest of the group). Von Doom convinces him that Reed and Sue are too distracted by each other to be able to work effectively on a cure for him and that he's better off throwing in his lot with Victor to sort his condition out.
The pair get their chance when Reed and Sue attempt a reversal of the mutation procedure using Reed's radiation chamber which misfires due to the pair being unable to harness sufficient power to it and leads to Sue having to rush Reed to hospital. Ben and Victor promptly break into the lab and fire up the machine with Ben going first. Victor uses his metal arm to add the extra power into the machine and Ben is returned to normal while Victor is given a massive power boost and his mutation is completed. Unfortunately for Ben, it was all a double cross and Victor promptly attacks Ben and leaves him for dead. Reed returns just in time but Victor easily overpowers him and kidnaps him.
Now known as Dr Doom, he tortures Mr Fantastic by freezing him with liquid nitrogen and threatening to snap his rubber limbs off. Sue and Jonny, meanwhile, have both returned to HQ and discovered Ben there. Doom has left a security camera behind and quickly launches a heat-seeking missile with Jonny turning into the Human Torch and leading the missile on a chase through Manhattan before diving into the river with the missile torching a garbage boat instead.
Sue manages to sneak into Doom's HQ using her invisibility and frees Victor while Ben decides to transform back into the Thing using the machine and follows her leading to a confrontation between Doom and the Fantastic Four in the street. Sue traps Doom in a forcefield which Jonny uses his Human Torch abilities to set on fire. Although Doom survives without too much damage, the Thing and Mr Fantastic then use their abilities to douse him with a jet of water from a fire hydrant which locks his metal suit solid and allows the police to arrest him and send him back to his home country of Latveria in a shipping crate. In the final sequence, Reed proposes to Sue who accepts while Ben gets together with Alicia and Jonny is...just Jonny I guess, still enjoying the company of models and generally living the high life.
In all honesty, I went into this expecting the worst but it wasn't quite as awful as I was fearing. The things wrong with it - the plot is very stop-start, rushing through the origin story, stalling for what feels like an age in the middle, completely mishandling Dr Doom's origin story and then going on to a final fight that ultimately ends up being a little bit of an anticlimax. There's also lots of little niggly things it gets wrong like the Thing being shorter than both Mr Fantastic and the Human Torch (I mean seriously guys, CGI?). However...there's enough little signs in here that give a frustrating glimpse that this could have been quite good if only they'd worked a bit more on the story. The cast are generally fairly sound with the exceptions of Alba as Sue Storm and McMahon as Dr Doom who feel a bit miscast (though McMahon really isn't helped by how badly his character is handled by the storyline) and the special effects are decent enough with the odd bit of decent dialogue here and there (Evans and Chiklis especially getting a few decent lines in - you can definitely see why Evans would go on to greater success as Captain America in the years ahead) to make sure there's enough sparks to just about keep you entertained through the slow bits.
Ultimately, this is a very frustrating near-miss but it does give you the feeling that with a few tweaks, this series could have had legs. Despite poor critical reviews, the film did well enough at the box office to lead to sequel being commissioned in the form of 2007's "Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer" which we'll be reviewing in a few weeks' time on here. That film was very much sink or swim time for the series and...well, let's not make any bones about it, it sunk. But given that this one, despite not being a classic, was a little bit better than I remember it being first time out, it'll be interesting to see if time has been similarly lenient to its follow-up...
FINAL RATING: ④④④④④ (5/10)
CURRENT MARVEL FILM TABLE
1. Spiderman 2 (2004) (9/10)
2. Spiderman (2002) (9/10)
3. X-Men 2 (2002) (8/10)
4. Men In Black (1997) (8/10)
5. X-Men (2000) (8/10)
6. Blade 2 (2001) (7/10)
7. Blade (1998) (7/10)
8. The Incredible Hulk Returns (1988) (6/10)
9. The Punisher (2004) (6/10)
10. Conan The Barbarian (1982) (6/10)
11. Elektra (2005) (6/10)
12. Conan The Destroyer (1984) (6/10)
13. The Trial Of The Incredible Hulk (1989) (6/10)
14. Blade Trinity (2004) (6/10)
15. Men In Black 2 (2000) (6/10)
16. The Incredible Hulk (1977) (5/10)
17. The Fantastic Four (2005) (5/10)
18. Doctor Mordrid (1992) (5/10)
19. The Punisher (1989) (5/10)
20. Doctor Strange (1978) (5/10)
21. Nick Fury: Agent Of SHIELD (1998) (4/10)
22. The Fantastic Four (1994) (4/10)
23. Hulk (2003) (4/10)
24. Red Sonja (1985) (4/10)
25. Captain America 2: Death Too Soon (1979) (4/10)
26. Spiderman (1977) (4/10)
27. The Death Of The Incredible Hulk (1990) (3/10)
28. Man-Thing (2005) (3/10)
29. Spiderman: The Dragon's Challenge (1979) (3/10)
30. Howard The Duck (1986) (2/10)
31. Captain America (1990) (2/10)
32. Captain America (1979) (2/10)
33. Generation X (1996) (2/10)
34. Spiderman Strikes Back (1978) (2/10)
35. Daredevil (2003) (2/10)
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