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75Blessedly unimportant, Fantastic Four cruises along on modest yet genuine comic-book pleasures.
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75It's done with an agreeable confidence and flair, the actors all fit comfortably in their roles and the effects are fun.
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70A funky, fun film version of the famous Marvel superhero concoction, one of the earliest of the revisionist wave of supes and in some ways the most lovable or at least the most knowable.
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63I don't think it will seriously disappoint longtime fans, but it made me itchy as I watched it unfold in ways that the comics never did when I read them in the '60s.
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63Frustrating because it doesn't seem far removed from a wholly enjoyable motion picture, but the tempo's off, beats are missed, and the production ends up sounding out-of-tune.
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63In a summer of low movie expectations and worse results, Fantastic Four is a not-so-bad mindless bit of camp escapism that doesn't try to eclipse its dime-store comic book roots.
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Michael Chiklis (of the cop show "The Shield") steals the movie as the agonized Thing.
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50It's fun to watch superheroes who aren't quite at ease with their abilities, but "The Incredibles" - last year's similarly themed animated film - is livelier and funnier.
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50Even if you can get past the acting -- and in the case of the beautiful, blank Alba, that's asking a lot -- the film just sits there, not exactly torturous, but never very exciting, either.
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50There's nothing terribly fantastic about this ho-hum futuristic foray.
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50This clumsy, cheesy, chintzy adaptation, with its F/X that look dated the moment you see them, is like something left over from the '60s.
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50It's a waste of classic material. Rent "The Incredibles" and see what should have been.
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50Fantastic Four doesn't expand on, or even illuminate, anything much beyond the most basic theme of what it feels like to be an adolescent misfit. This is a comic-book movie that actually makes an effort not to go over kids' heads.
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50A garish mediocrity.
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50Fails to be anything more than a mild summertime diversion. Based on the Marvel comic book, it's a prototypical air conditioner movie.
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50A wildly uneven, sporadically slapdash action-adventure that amuses in fits and starts.
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50This "Four" ain't so "Fantastic."
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40A colossal snore.
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40Favors light action over character dynamics.
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40The release of Fantastic Four marks the beginning of the end for movies based on Marvel Comics' upper tier of characters.
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40Fleetingly enjoyable in very short bursts, this is the most cynically constructed event movie in recent memory, its heart purely in its wallet. A fantastic bore.
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40After this mediocrity, no one's even going to remember Roger Corman's godawful bargain-basement 1994 version. Which, on second thought, had a lot more heart that this one.
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40A comic-book movie unashamed of its roots, meaning it's unabashed about being silly, overwrought nonsense, which works to its benefit--so much so that you're almost rooting for it by the end.
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40Compared with the psychological probing and spiritual brooding of "Batman Begins," Fantastic Four is proudly dumb, loud and inconsequential.
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38It needed a star like Clooney at its center, and a character actor like Alan Rickman as Dr. Doom. You don't expect realism from a comic-book movie, but you do want the characters to seem larger than life.
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38There's nothing remotely fantastic about this Fantastic Four.
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30Directing seems an unduly elegant term for what Hollywood hack du jour Tim Story (Barbershop, Taxi) does here -- the action scenes are so choppily constructed that their excitement disappears faster than the Invisible Woman.
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The action sequences reek of drudgery rather than adventure, and with the exception of Chiklis's remarkably soulful performance beneath 60 pounds of orange Thing makeup, all of the characters are flatter than their two-dimensional counterparts.
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30An overinflated B-movie with no grace, no subtext, no wit, and featuring beefcake/cheesecake actors who look like they've been plucked from the soaps.
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30The result is a movie groping for a comic tone while its FX machinery spews vast clouds of visual gibberish.
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25The really good superhero movies, like "Superman," "SpiderMan 2" and "Batman Begins," leave Fantastic Four so far behind that the movie should almost be ashamed to show itself in the same theaters.
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25A perfect storm of wooden acting, hackneyed direction, inane scripting and laughably cartoonish special effects produces a shapeless mess more wearyingly stupid than arch-villian Dr. Doom is evil.
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25They take on special powers that the filmmakers are incapable of making interesting, partly because the characters are ciphers, and partly because the story is listless and uninventive.
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25What the movie lacks most is a real sense of adventure.
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25From less a purist's standpoint than a seeker of serviceable junk food, this comprehensive waste of time is too bouncy to be an "Elektra" bummer, but should make Marvel mascot Stan Lee think twice about burning another lucrative bridge with unintentional hilarity.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 73 out of 138
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Mixed: 20 out of 138
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Negative: 45 out of 138