The heroes are bland, the action is minimal and the story is thin

01:00 AM EDT on Friday, July 8, 2005

BY CHRIS VOGNAR
The Dallas Morning News

Rarely terrible, let alone memorable, Fantastic Four is a brutally average piece of disposable summer entertainment that fades from the mind like some hazy, half-sleeping dream.

The heroes are bland. The action is minimal. The story is thinner than Mr. Fantastic in mid-stretch.

Forgettable fun? Sure. Fantastic? Not even close.

The Fantastic Four flew into the Marvel Comics universe before The Hulk or Spider-Man, and their origins were quaintly simple.

The new Fantastic Four is happy to refresh our memory. They were astronauts exposed to "cosmic rays." They journeyed to space because, in the succinct words of prim, proper Sue Storm, they didn't want "the Commies to beat us to it." Once zapped by the rays, they returned to Earth with an eclectic range of super powers: elasticity (Mr. Fantastic), invisibility (The Invisible Girl), flammability (The Human Torch) and brute strength accompanied by orange, rock-like skin (The Thing).

B-movie king Roger Corman tried to do a Fantastic Four on the cheap in 1994; it never got off the ground.

The new movie-by-committee version, directed by Tim Story, has no budget problems. Its chief ailments have to do with narrative momentum. Once our modernized quartet return from studying DNA in space, you would expect them to try out their new ability with a bang. Instead, they spend the middle part of the movie seeking a cure that will make them normal again. Now that's exciting.

The leader of the bunch, Mr. Fantastic (Ioan Gruffudd), is supposed to be a sort of stick in the mud, and Gruffudd meets the requirement with ease.

The backstory gods inform us that when Mr. F was merely Dr. Richards, he drove his fun-seeking girlfriend, a newly hip and sultry Storm (ubiquitous magazine "It Girl" Jessica Alba), to take up with a rival research scientist (Julian McMahon), who just might turn into the requisite super villain, Dr. Doom.

It seems Dr. Richards was just too boring for her -- a great reason to put him in the middle of an action movie in which he evolves slowly and vapidly.

Most of the fun stuff comes courtesy of The Human Torch (appealing hotshot Chris Evans) and The Thing (Michael Chiklis of the hit cop show The Shield). Evans brings a sort of X-Games swagger to the proceedings; Chiklis, buried in a ton of prosthetic makeup, manages a touch of pathos as the only member of the FF whose condition doesn't come and go on demand.

But neither character can supply the thrills or whimsy needed to make up for the lazy story and lack of overall vision.

Fantastic Four has very little of the epic gravitas or moral complexity that distinguish the best superhero movies.

That would be fine if it were an overflowing boatload of fun. But it's not. Instead, it's content to be an eye pleasing lark that moves competently from scene to scene without purpose or urgency.

Fantastic Four is built to last about as long the ever-present plastic toy tie-ins that now seem to say "summer movies" better than any actual summer movies.

**1/2

Fantastic Four

Starring: Michael Chiklis, Jessica Alba, Ioan Gruffudd, Chris Evans, Julian McMahon.

Rated: PG-13, contains violence, adult themes.