Fantastic Four. No "The."

[Remo D]

Okay, now we can tell them apart. The unreleased Roger Corman production was called THE FANTASTIC FOUR, and this new movie drops the word THE.

Hoping for more? Such as "the bad one" never got released, so that it could make way at last for "the good one?"

To-may-to, To-mah-to.

This new movie gives us all the "new and improved" special effects in the world, the hype machine, and the overexposed (in the wrong sense of the term) Jessica Alba... but it still fails to be any more interesting or entertaining than the non-released version. Well, okay, Michael Chiklis steals it as Ben Grimm/The Thing. No surprise there--I've never seen THE SHIELD, but he rose above two previously excoriated efforts with excellent portrayals of John Belushi and Curly Howard, so I've always liked him.

Wasn't interested in Reed Richards, Sue Storm or Victor Von Doom, and as for Johnny Storm? I'm sure he was SUPPOSED to be excruciatingly obnoxious, but that didn't make him any more fun to watch.

And for a two-hour film, some chunks of what story there was still seemed to be missing! (For example, at one point, Reed seems to microwave himself to the point where he's going to melt into a puddle of goo--but then he's fine the next time we see him? I thought we could get a fun bit where they surfaced the driveway with him, but no...)

Hey, my children liked it--and why not? If it's a purely visual thing where you get to see those fun comic book characters do their thing, then you'll get that. Just do me a favor--if you like this new movie, I won't give you a hard time about it, but don't knock me for preferring LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN in the meantime, okay?