IRON MAN
(Review)

Jon Favreau’s Iron Man has the distinction of achieving a number of firsts.
It was the first major hit of the 2008 summer (at the time of this review’s posting, the film is the third highest grosser of the year thus far, in the wake of The Dark Knight and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull); it was the first film to be produced by Marvel Studios; it was the first in what looks to be another successful Hollywood franchise; it was the first Marvel comic film since Bryan Singer’s X2 that left me nearly completely satisfied, an agreeable taste of popcorn cinema that had just enough substance informing its four-colour antics to make it soar right over the heads of recent muddled and murky Marvel entries.
And, just like Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, it found a franchise star in the unlikeliest of Hollywood actors.


But the truth is, a large part of why Iron Man works is due to Robert Downey, Jr., whose Tony Stark is the lovable billionaire industrialist cad, who is made to suddenly face the brutal reality of his company’s weapons manufacturing.
Downey nails not just the all-consuming obsessive quality of the driven genius, but also the heartfelt sense of atonement Stark adopts after a weapons field test in Afghanistan turns into a three-month long imprisonment.
Understanding that the fruits of his company have been subverted and used against both innocents and the young American soldiers whose lives he’s been trying to safeguard on the battlefield, Stark takes it upon himself to once again wrestle with the conundrum of building a weapon of war to uphold the peace.


But this time, the weapon is solely under his control, in the hands of this flawed individual, whose call to heroism is fueled by the need to right the wrongs committed with the products of his industry, with the leavings of his genius (a theme ironically magnified in the film through the subplot which sees the development of the Iron Monger, the titular hero’s mechanical nemesis, his automated Other).
Downey manages to put this all up on the screen, while still keeping the rakish Stark a jaunty presence; unlike another troubled billionaire playboy, Stark isn’t the brooding type.
And yet, the sense of a burdened soul intent on making things right is still clearly evident.


This humour and humanity amidst the combination of Iron Man’s high-tech comic book world and the nearly pinpoint marriage of physical effects and CGI on-screen goes a long way in making this a summer Hollywood tentpole that’s about more than just the explosions and the adrenaline.
And in that particular corner, Downey is helped along by Gwyneth Paltrow (who plays Stark’s ever loyal girl Friday, Pepper Potts) and Jeff Bridges (as Obadiah Stane, Tony’s erstwhile right hand at Stark Industries). The performances from the trio suggest casual, comfortable relationships, grounding the movie’s fantastic goings-on in a realistic milieu.
I might have added Terrence Howard as well, but his James Rhodes doesn’t get much screen time, and seems to be in the film primarily for the purposes of introducing the character to this potential new franchise; in the comic books, Rhodes eventually dons a variation of the Iron Man armour as War Machine.


A more interesting introduction made in the film though, is that of the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division, which comic geeks will know as S.H.I.E.L.D.
This particular introduction of course, bleeds into that post-credits bit with Sam Jackson, which then bleeds into the Tony Stark cameo in Louis Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk.
And that’s probably another Iron Man first: it’s potentially the first in a long line of interconnected Marvel Studios films.

Immediately (and to my mind at least, rather prematurely) following the box office success of Iron Man, Marvel Studios announced a whole slate of subsequent films, which included adaptations of Thor and Captain America, all leading up to a proposed Avengers movie.
They had the 2010 and 2011 release dates down pat, and they had logos for the film’s titles too. Of course, they had no scripts, no casts, no directors.
But that didn’t stop them from locking themselves into very specific release dates.

It’s this annoying tendency of Marvel to shoot themselves in the foot just when they’re getting it right that always bugs me.
As I mentioned in my review of The Incredible Hulk (see Archive), Marvel needs to cultivate a little more circumspection.
Just because their bad—or otherwise terribly flawed—adaptations (see any Marvel comic book film between X2 and Iron Man) make money, doesn’t mean they’re worth the celluloid they’re shot on.


There needs to be integrity, substance, and humanity in a comic book film to serve as solid testaments to a fact that we comic geeks have known for a very long time: that the comic book is a valid medium of artistic expression, that it’s about more than just fistfights and spandex, and that it certainly isn’t just for kids.
I’m happy to say that Iron Man is one from Marvel that makes that grade.
Here’s hoping they keep their eye on that more valuable, lasting prize.

Parting shot: For the record (and to paradoxically showcase that other, more readily apparent prize), as of August 10, 2008, Iron Man has a worldwide gross of $568,178,682, while The Dark Knight clocks in at a whopping $645,241,000 in only 24 days of release. (As a point of comparison, Iron Man has been in theatres for 101 days.)
Meanwhile, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has raked in $744,839,965 in 81 days of release.

(Iron Man OS courtesy of impawards.com [design by BLT & Associates]; images courtesy of guardian.co.uk, cinematical.com, ew.com, latimes.com, and wired.com.)

AFTERTHOUGHTS (96)
EMPIRE’S! 50! GREATEST! COMIC! BOOK! CHARACTERS! [2 of 5]
THE X-MEN EDITION

Though I’m pretty much a DC fanboy (and always have been), the one Marvel title that I loved way back when was ­The Uncanny X-Men, back in the classic Chris Claremont era.
And naturally, I was rabid over Grant Morrison’s New X-Men.
Filmwise, I wasn’t bowled over by Bryan Singer’s first pass on the material, though I love X2. Brett Ratner’s X-Men: The Last Stand was, like Spider-Man 3, a mess that had too much going on in it.
Hopefully, next year’s Wolverine spin-off will have learned from past X-film mistakes…
I also loved Sir Ian McKellen’s Magneto, more so than Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, who is already, let’s face it, a pretty good fit. (Though I do think Magneto’s helmet in the film looks terrible…)


30 Emma Frost (aka: The White Queen)
Bad girls in comics are always so useful that they tend to reform and become at least semi-goodies (cf: Catwoman, Elektra).
Emma Frost was introduced as an exceptionally nasty—and explicitly perverse—villainess, running a school for evil mutants in competition with Professor Xavier and high in the councils of the nefarious Hellfire Club (in homage to the famous ‘Touch of Brimstone’ episode of The Avengers).
Marvel made her a qualified goodie in the X-Men spin-off Generation X, and writer Grant Morrison reinvented the character when he took over New X-Men and wasn’t allowed to use his original choice, Storm.
Now an actual X-Man, Emma remained the manipulative slut fans loved to hate—and caused a minor kerfuffle when she began a ‘telepathic’ affair with Cyclops, long-term partner of Jean Grey.


Despite strong competition, Emma has consistently worn the most striking lingerie (and little else) in comics—the covers for her brief solo series Emma Frost are basically porn star poses.
FIRST APPEARED IN UNCANNY X-MEN #129 (1980)
CREATED BY CHRIS CLAREMONT AND JOHN BYRNE


9 Magneto (aka: Erik Magnus Lehnsherr, The Master of Magnetism)
Magneto is... complicated.
A Jewish survivor of the Holocaust who is determined to save his fellow homo superior from the fate of his fellow Jew, he sometimes seems fated to repeat some of the Nazis' mistakes, pursuing the subjugation of homo sapiens in favour of homo superior.
He is—as producer Tom DeSanto told Bryan Singer when he was trying to persuade him to make the first X-Men movie—Malcolm X to Professor X’s Martin Luther King.
His ‘by any means necessary’ approach has seen him commit hideous atrocities in the past, including the sinking of a submarine full of sailors, and yet he’s not evil—not in the traditional sense of the word, anyway.
Even though he’s traditionally their number one nemesis, he has been known to actively align with the X-Men, even taking over as the team’s leader/teacher in the absence of Charles Xavier, while he’s previously had a relationship with Rogue.


Currently in the films, he’s depowered, and living life as a human—which, for him, is purgatory. But we’re sure his powerless state won’t last for long.
FIRST APPEARED IN X-MEN #1 (1963)
CREATED BY STAN LEE AND JACK KIRBY


4 Wolverine (aka: Logan, James Howlett, Patch, Weapon X)
Originally conceived as a villainous means of giving Hulk a bit of a workout, but swiftly retooled as a conflicted hero, Wolverine’s always been a character comfortable with shades of grey, and it’s his contradictions and complications that enable him to be all things to all geeks.
So he has an unmatched capacity for violence (even berserkery) and finely honed animal instinct, but is capable of tempering his highly emotional reactions with cold-blooded calculation where required.


And he’s no mere thug: his studies in Japan and long history of travel, espionage and trouble-finding have given him a knowledge of differing cultures, he speaks a number of languages, and has a deep appreciation of ice-cold beer (see, for example, Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men, where beer brings Wolverine back from a hypnotised state).
Also, he has the sort of facial hair that generations of young men have grown up aspiring to.
FIRST APPEARED IN HULK #181 (1974)
CREATED BY LEN WEIN, JOHN ROMITA SR


The above write-ups are from Empire’s list.
For more on the above characters (including who Singer saw as his potential White Queen), just click on their names; the entire list will be accessible from there.

In Part 3—Afterthoughts (97)—we note some characters from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.

(Images courtesy of greghornjudge.com [Emma Frost and Wolverine, art by Greg Horn]; artofhagan.com [Magneto, art by Brian Hagan]; about.com [Sir Ian McKellen as Magneto; photo by Nels Israelson]; and marvel.com [Emma Frost, New X-Men cover art by Frank Quitely, Wolverine, and Hugh Jackman as Wolverine].)

THE INCREDIBLE HULK
(Review)

Following an opening credits sequence that quickly and firmly establishes this as reboot more than straight-up continuation of Ang Lee’s flawed Hulk, Louis Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk finds the on-the-run Bruce Banner (this time played by Edward Norton) hiding out in Brazil.
Doing his darnedest to learn the language and keep his head down, he works at a bottling factory while simultaneously learning to control his anger and exploring avenues to purge himself of the not-very-jolly green giant that lurks inside him.
It’s an interesting way to kick-start this pseudo-sequel, with a very conscious nod to the character’s 70’s TV incarnation (likewise titled The Incredible Hulk), which followed the episodic template of Banner in a new town, hiding out, working some odd job or other, till some occurrence would trigger the Hulk’s emergence, and the poor man would need to uproot himself once more, till he found a new place to hang his hat 7 days later.
Acknowledging the contribution the TV show has had on the public’s awareness of the character is one of the things The Incredible Hulk gets right. In fact, the script by Zak Penn (subsequently re-tooled by Norton) seems designed to have something for everyone: that opening act for the TV fans; the romantic angle—with Liv Tyler taking over for Jennifer Connelly—for the drama enthusiasts; the repeated clashes with Emil Blonsky/the Abomination—played by Tim Roth—for the comic book fanboys.
In this, and some other aspects, The Incredible Hulk plays much better than Lee’s effort. That, however, doesn’t make it a complete success.

To its credit, the film’s main players are very nearly a solid bunch.
To begin with, Norton makes a more credible Banner than Eric Bana. Bana’s an excellent actor, don’t get me wrong, but his more conventional silver screen good looks made his take on the character seem less tortured somehow, less the character from the comic books rather than a Hollywood version of that character.
Norton’s Banner, on the other hand, seems to hearken back, not just to the comic book scientist dealt a cruel hand by fate, but again, also to the Bill Bixby TV version of the character, the eternal wanderer both out of his depth and out of place, trying to regain the peace of mind and heart that the gamma poisoning has taken away from him.
And while William Hurt makes for a passably effective—if not overwhelmingly memorable—General Ross, Tim Roth manages to make a practically one-dimensional antagonist something worth watching.

But even as Roth (and Norton, for that matter) can usually be depended upon to bring the thespic goods to the screen, Liv Tyler can sometimes be one of a film’s weak cast links; see Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Thankfully, here, she delivers just enough of what the script and role demand of her to make her Betty credible as Banner’s long-suffering true love.
Most valuable supporting player though, goes without a doubt, to Tim Blake Nelson, whose Samuel Sterns is cut from the excitable, unstable genius cloth, and who we can only hope will—should The Incredible Hulk make some green at the box office—be seen more of in a sequel (or in that seemingly impending Avengers movie).
Ty Burrell (from the Dawn of the Dead remake and the recently cancelled Back To You) though, just seems like an odd choice for Doc Samson, who we see only enough of to establish him as the man with the thankless task of having kept Betty’s heart warm while she waited for her true love to come back into her life. (And trying to imagine how Burrell will essay Samson if and when his hair should turn green somewhere down the road seems even odder…)

Now, while Lee’s Hulk took one step forward by couching the established four-colour mythos in the emotional complexity he always brings to his films, he also took it two steps backward by choosing to shoot and edit the film as if it were, in fact, a comic book movie.
What I ended up seeing was a schizophrenic film that strove to make the characters real and three-dimensional, while constantly reminding me of the source material’s two-dimensional pulp origins. It seemed to yearn to transcend the material, but at the same time displayed a superficial—and ultimately distracting—fascination with the comic medium’s narrative conventions.
Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk though, clearly embraces its comic book (and television) origins, while striving to bring to the fore the romantic relationship that has always been part and parcel of Bruce Banner’s story. It also wisely curbs any over-reaching ambitions, steering clear of the cluttered narrative landscapes of Marvel entries like Spider-Man 3 and X-Men: The Last Stand.

So, despite the film’s rhythm being less than ideal (some sequences—yes, even some of the action pieces—drag a bit), and its CGI still not quite achieving entirely realistic and convincing levels, this arguably makes for better viewing than Lee’s Hulk.
It’s also most definitely better than some of the other past Marvel cinematic fare, like Ghost Rider and Elektra, so if only for that, Marvel should be commended.
Now if only they learn to be circumspect, and not jump the gun while in the heady wake of Iron Man’s box office success (that terribly premature announcement of a 2010-2011 schedule is most definitely not being circumspect), then they stand a better chance of keeping this winning streak going.

Parting shot: Reviews of some other Marvel comic book films—including Ghost Rider, Elektra, and the Fantastic Four movies—can be found in the Archive, where reviews of Leterrier’s Danny the Dog and the Zak Penn-written Suspect Zero are also ensconced.

(The Incredible Hulk OS [design by Crew Creative Advertising] courtesy of impawards.com.)

reVIEW (33)
ELEKTRA

Since my review for Suspect Zero went up here at the Iguana because it was co-written by Zak Penn, I figured this one should go up too, since it was also written by Penn. (Boy, it’s a good thing I enjoyed Incident at Loch Ness, or Penn might think I’ve got it in for him…)

Marvel really does know how to shoot itself in the foot.
For all their initiative in translating their superhero properties onto the big screen in the past few years—leaving DC far behind in the dust—it’s really only been Bryan Singer’s X2, Guillermo del Toro’s Blade II, and Sam Raimi’s Spider-man, that have passed muster. All their other movies have run the gamut from, a) better-than-good-but-not-great (X-Men), to b) disappointing (Ang Lee’s The Hulk), to c) just plain awful (Mark Steven Johnson‘s Daredevil).
Rob Bowman’s Elektra though, has the distinction of being the first of Marvel’s recent screen adaptations that is downright boring. And if it’s one thing a comic book film shouldn’t be, it’s boring. The four-color world of comics is frenetic and stylized, charged with adrenaline, and, in the case of red-clad assassin Elektra, a fair amount of pubescent hormones. Unfortunately, none of that is carried over to Bowman’s film.

Picking up some years after the events in Daredevil, Elektra begins with some voice-over back story by Terence Stamp’s Stick, before segueing into a standard sequence which is supposed to establish how formidable our heroine is. Her existence is now considered an urban legend, since she died, after all, in Daredevil. Now an assassin-for-hire, it isn’t long before she gets embroiled in the affairs of The Hand, an evil order of ninja—we know they are evil because when their minions die, they dissolve into billowing yellow smoke—with sinister designs on “The Treasure,” a warrior pivotal to the battle between light and dark.
What follows is a film that is not so much predictable as it is blandly unsurprising. Revelations are made in the course of the story that do absolutely nothing to raise the tepid sense of detached observation which quickly sets in while watching Jennifer Garner alternate between agonizing over the loss of her mother at an early age, and kicking Hand butt.
Sadly, not even the action sequences do much to alter the tenor of Elektra. Uniformly unimpressive—despite one that has a neat set-up with a multitude of floating white sheets—the fight scenes are even more inept than another recent Marvel entry, Blade: Trinity’s, and those were already nearly dispensable. Even the showdown with the quartet of enemy warriors—who we know are formidable and merciless because their grand entrance is done in slow-motion—are horribly inconsequential, as is Elektra’s face-off with main baddie, Kirigi (Will Yun Lee; Colonel Moon from Die Another Day). More’s the pity, considering Kirigi’s (again) none-too-surprising significance to Elektra’s life.

Zak Penn‘s script, in attempting to give us a human protagonist with a past filled with pain and emotion, ends up delivering a story totally devoid of action and tension, dealing, as it does, with story elements we’ve all seen before: the supposedly stone-cold killer with a good heart; the contract that isn’t what it seems; the targets that cause the killer to be conflicted, etcetera, ad nauseum.
Nowhere in the film’s running time do we actually feel a threat, a sense of danger. At no single point do we feel that life is a precious thing. After all, those of Elektra’s order can raise the dead, as they did with her. With that sort of power in your corner, why bother to worry?

Rob Bowman, meanwhile, elevates Elektra not a whit beyond its tension-free beginnings. An X-Files directorial alumnus, Bowman then went on to helm the X-Files feature film, as well as Reign of Fire. Other than a phantasmagoric kiss in a forest, and one of Elektra’s flashbacks involving an apparent demon, nothing in the film is indicative of any sort of directorial flair. Like the X-Files movie, Elektra is straight-forward and by-the-numbers, leaving no residue at all, no lingering feeling of “What did I just see?”, of the revelatory wonder that cinema is capable of.
Perhaps if the director were more versed in the very specific sort of world Elektra’s story is set in, then things would have turned out differently. This is a world steeped in martial arts and mysticism, the world of the Hong Kong martial arts genre, or, to be truer to Elektra’s comic book roots, the world of Japanese manga and anime.

Now, lest I be accused of racism, let me reiterate: Elektra needed a director versed in the genre. Quentin Tarantino understood it well in the Kill Bill saga, as did Guillermo del Toro in Blade II, and the Wachowskis in The Matrix, and none of them are Asian. Inappropriately, Bowman seems to have approached the material as if it were a normal action film with a touch of the supernatural thrown into the mix. Elektra needed to be soaked in a certain atmosphere, to have a specific sensibility. Instead, it languishes in a flavorless stock of mundane proportion.
Not even the presence of charismatic Terence Stamp—who has done everything in his career from facing down the Man of Steel in Superman II, to prancing around the Australian outback in drag in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert—manages to make a dent in the terribly pedestrian armor Elektra is wrapped in.

In the end, where Elektra is concerned, I think this was the biggest surprise: spinning off from the awful Daredevil, I thought it would either be better, or worse, with the greater possibility of being better, as Daredevil was already pretty bad
I just never expected Elektra to be a big, stupefying bore.

(Elektra OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

(The above is a slightly altered version of a previously published review entitled “Marvelous Bore.”)

FANTASTIC FOUR:
RISE OF THE SILVER SURFER
(Review)

If you’re a comic book fan who loves a good film adaptation of your favorite hero—and what self-respecting fanboy doesn’t?—the 80’s were not a kind decade to you.
DC’s Superman franchise was running on empty with Superman III, and that particular flight ended in a messy crash with Superman IV: The Quest For Peace. Meanwhile, Tim Burton was yet to redefine the superhero film at the tail end of the decade.
But for all the misfires DC had at the time, Marvel was by far the more evil villain in that scenario.
There were low budget attempts at Captain America and The Punisher, and inept TV stabs at Thor and Daredevil, all of them not particularly good, and some, downright dreadful.
Funnily enough, these days it feels like a Marvel renaissance, with most of their efforts falling squarely into the not-particularly-good-and-some-downright-dreadful category.
Granted, the effects and costumes are way better, but a lot of the plots and scripts, and some of the performances, could very well have traveled here on a time machine from the good old 80’s to leave us comic geeks with sleepless, rant-filled nights.*

At this point, I should establish that Marvel’s latest, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, is actually better than some past turkeys like Ghost Rider, Daredevil, and Elektra. FF:RotSS is even better than its predecessor (see reVIEW (1); Archive June 2007).
That doesn’t make it a good film though.

The plot is just as threadbare as the original’s: the Silver Surfer (frequent Guillermo Del Toro collaborator Doug Jones, voiced by Laurence Fishburne) arrives on Earth to prepare it for the coming of the dreaded Galactus (in this incarnation, a planet-devouring cloud), thus disrupting the fourth attempt at a proper wedding by Reed Richards (Ioan Gruffudd) and Sue Storm (Jessica Alba).
The U.S. Military gets Reed to help them, Victor Von Doom (Julian McMahon) crashes the party, Galactus arrives, but is thwarted by our heroes.
In the midst of all this, what I can only assume are attempts at “fun” and “funny”—schtick that barely manages to be juvenile hi-jinx—pepper the 92 minute running time like fleas on a mangy dog. (And though it’s good that all the power-switching becomes a climactic plot point, the bachelor party dance is still a particularly atrocious bit.)

Just as in Fantastic Four, where there was no joy to be found in a plot, we also don’t really see much in the way of characters again.
Even Chris Evans, whose superficial Johnny Storm was the highlight of the team in the first film, doesn’t seem as convincing as he once was. And what could have been an interesting character arc (as Johnny learns some much-needed lessons in responsibility) is not fully explored.
There’s some conflict with Sue wanting a normal married life away from the media spotlight, but it’s pretty much lip service and doesn’t have the ring of authenticity.

It’s really only when the CGI takes center stage that the film becomes halfway decent, particularly when Galactus arrives to devour the Earth, ironically, the sequence that could potentially piss off countless fanboys with its depiction of the Jack Kirby planet-eater as a roiling cloud.
With visual effects by Weta, The Orphanage, and a handful of other effects houses, the spectacle is certainly not too shabby. But without any honest emotional underpinnings and real characters, the film cannot generate any genuine tension and is grossly unsuccessful in involving its audience in its story. Without characters to truly care for, all we’ve got here that merits any sort of attention are pixels; pixels that are sure pretty to look at, but certainly not pixels worth any sort of emotional investment.
Did it look impressive? At times, it actually did.
Did I feel for once that there was any real danger, that the Earth stood on the brink of total destruction, and that all life as we know it was in jeopardy?
Certainly not.

If there is any triumph to be found here, it’s that director Tim Story managed to deliver a better film than the sad-a$$ original. (At the very least, Story’s got a better track record than Mark Steven Johnson. Already guilty of inflicting Daredevil upon us, Johnson outdid himself with the horrible Ghost Rider; review in Archive March 2007.)
But it’s a hollow victory, as FF:RotSS is nowhere near being a good comic book film adaptation; it’s the kind of comic book film where the heroes still have time to do some goofy skywriting even as Venice is sinking into the sea.
It’s all ultimately very inconsequential and disposable, like a planet that’s had the life sucked out of it by Galactus. And where’s the fun in taking an hour-and-a-half long round through lifeless territory?

* The other thing that’s different about Marvel’s current crop of stinkers is that a lot of them are making money. Ghost Rider is actually the 13th biggest film of the year at the moment, with a total gross of $115, 802, 596. FF:RotSS is 10th, with $128,879,368! (And these are just the domestic figures for the U.S. box office.)

(Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer OS courtesy of kinopoisk.ru.)

A few introductory words…

This is the inaugural voyage of reVIEW, where I’ll be running reviews of past films for any number of reasons.
For example, for this particular installment, I’m resurrecting an old review of Tim Story’s Fantastic Four, as its sequel, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, opens tomorrow in the local multiplexes.
Will it be better than its predecessor? I certainly hope so…

reVIEW (1)
FANTASTIC FOUR

Since 1998’s Blade, Marvel has glutted the multiplexes with film adaptations of their comic book superheroes: inclusive of Blade, an even dozen in 7 years. Sadly though, I've only fully enjoyed three of these: Guillermo Del Toro’s Blade II, Bryan Singer’s X2, and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man. (I actually have a lot of issues with X-Men and Spider-Man 2, so they're not on that particular shortlist.)

The rest, well…

So where does that leave Marvel’s latest, Tim Story’s Fantastic Four? Biting a whole hell of a lot of cosmic dust.

Brilliant and bankrupt scientist Reed Richards (Ioan Gruffudd, King Arthur’s Lancelot) approaches long-time rival Victor Von Doom (Julian McMahon, from TV’s Profiler, Charmed, and Nip/Tuck) to fund a space mission to research the effects of a cosmic storm on the genetic structure of organisms. Along for the ride are Richards’ best friend Ben Grimm (Michael Chiklis, TV’s The Shield), his ex-girlfriend, Sue Storm (Jessica Alba), and Sue’s brother, Johnny (Cellular’s Chris Evans).
In grand comic book tradition, the irradiation they suffer in a freak accident causes genetic mutations (CGI, ahoy!) which, though apparently giving Doom precisely what he wants, pisses him off so much, he goes after the media-dubbed Fantastic Four, intent on putting their budding superhero careers to a quick and sudden stop.
Now, fair warning, I’m not exaggerating when I say that that’s the whole movie. No frills, no nothing. Just that.

On the heels of Marvel’s recent stinkers, Blade: Trinity and Elektra, I was truly hoping that Fantastic Four would at least have some of the kinetic energy all comic book films should have as a matter of course.
Instead, it’s a pretty standard and unimpressive tale we’re treated to. Which is doubly frustrating for me, as Four’s script was co-written by Mark Frost, who co-created (with David Lynch) my all-time favorite television series, Twin Peaks, and wrote the excellent period thriller The List of 7. I’m not exactly sure what Frost contributed to the script, but I’m hard-pressed to find anything of significant redeeming value.
The plot, as I outlined above, is a bare-bones comic adventure of the old school, with characters that never manage to rise above the two dimensions of their four-color pulp origins.

In the nearly two hours of running time, we are told who these characters are, without the plot actually presenting any opportunity for us to see what they’re really about.
We’re constantly told how smart Reed is, but never actually see Gruffudd come across as frighteningly intellectual; he seems more uptight and distracted. Ben’s loyalty to Reed seems hardly sketched in. Alba (making a bid to join the ranks of Genre Pin-Up Girls) meanwhile, also doesn’t register as the genetics expert she’s supposed to be. Assertive woman, sometimes. Brainy, no.
The only one who manages to come across is Evans, who even cuts the figure of a superhero in the body-hugging costumes designed by Jose Fernandez and Wendy Partridge. (Partridge also designed costumes for Del Toro films Blade II and Hellboy.) Of course, Johnny Storm is the most shallow of the quartet, so his let’s-have-fun-with-this philosophy gets really old, really quick.
And McMahon’s Doom, though certainly not as dismal a villain as Dominic Purcell’s Drake in Blade: Trinity, is still a painfully flat and uninteresting character.
Thus, saddled with these cardboard cut-outs moving through the paces of a threadbare plot, nothing in this film seems of any particular consequence, and the climactic battle unfolds as obligatory pantomime, the closing celebration like a cartoon ending with all the heroes smiling and laughing, and the sinister coda a painful telegraph of “Sequel!”

Once more, Marvel, in its rush to get its properties on the silver screen, has apparently handed material over to writers and directors who don’t seem to know what to do with it.
There is nothing particularly fresh in Fantastic Four to make the film worth the audience’s while. This is stale and leaden, yet another sign of Marvel’s acceptance of the mediocre for the end result of character recognizability (which translates into revenue from the myriad media tie-ins, including of course, the comics from which the characters stem).
In the end though, it is Marvel’s seeming lack of respect for the film medium which leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Comic book characters may be one of Hollywood’s hot properties du jour, but all bubbles burst, and, with what Marvel’s doing these days, they’re shortening the bubble’s half-life in fantastic leaps and amazing bounds.

(This review was originally published—yes, as in printed on paper made from dead trees—under the title, “Can’t Seem To Get Past Four.”)

(Fantastic Four OS courtesy of impawards.com)

GHOST RIDER (Review)

Here’s a mind-boggling mystery that puts Easter Island and the Marie Celeste to shame: how the Hollywood money people could put Mark Steven Johnson in charge of another superhero film after the dreadful Daredevil.
Didn’t any of them watch that? And for that matter, didn’t Nicolas Cage?
Well, if they did and they still went happily along towards their grim fate which was Ghost Rider, then they deserve whatever may befall them, particularly bad reviews.

After a perfunctory voice over by Sam Elliott (who plays the mysterious Caretaker), we are introduced to the young Johnny Blaze (Matt Long, from TV’s Jack & Bobby), a stunt cyclist working with his father (Brett Cullen), and making googly eyes at Roxanne Simpson (Raquel Alessi).
Johnny’s plans to run away with Roxanne are curtailed when the young man discovers his father has cancer, and makes a deal with Mephistopheles (Peter Fonda): Johnny’s soul for the eradication of the cancer.
Well, M being who he is, takes away the cancer, but still screws Johnny big time, so the poor schmuck is forced to make the painful choice of staying away from Roxanne. Of course, given how these things go, he doesn’t bother to explain himself, just rides away on his motorcycle, leaving Roxanne drenched in the oh-so-dramatic pouring rain. Cad.
Years later, after Johnny has morphed into Nicolas Cage, M and Roxanne (now Eva Mendes doing her best impression of a TV reporter) both come back into his life simultaneously, while M’s son, Blackheart (Wes Bentley) is off to usurp the throne of King of the World from James Cameron.

Now, as the flaming-skull-headed Ghost Rider, Johnny has what is called “the Penance Stare,” where looking into the gaping holes where his eyes should be makes you experience all the pain your evil deeds have caused in the world, leaving you a blank-eyed husk, presumably feeling nothing at all.
One of the biggest problems I had with Ghost Rider was the fact that watching it was like being in a post-Penance Stare stupor. Nothing I saw on the screen engaged me enough to make me feel anything beyond a vague annoyance and a dim impatience to finally see the end credits start to roll.

To begin with, I am asked to accept as the protagonist a character whose personality tics (the Carpenters music, the jellybeans) are so annoyingly contrived, as to turn the character into more of a caricature than he already is. The melodramatic finger-pointing and comedic faces-in-the-mirror just make things all the worse.
On top of that, I am then asked to accept as the protagonist’s love interest, a complete cipher. This is just too much…
Given that the romance takes a sizeable chunk of screen time, I feel I should be able to see exactly why Johnny loves Roxanne, right? To get me invested. To make me see why Johnny is so torn up by the situation. To make me see why he cares so much for her. But all Roxanne is is a pretty-looking vacuum, true believers! She isn’t a character, she’s a walking plot complication.
Actually, come to think of it, I don’t see what Roxanne sees in Johnny either. (Unless of course, you’re the kind of girl who falls for the Nicolas Cage type, which is what you get here, basically. A flaming-skull-headed Nicolas Cage, decked out in spiked leather and chains.)

This is painful, people.
Seeing Peter Fonda in this kind of a movie isn’t all that surprising, really, but to see Wes Bentley here is a massive disappointment. I mean, Ricky Fitts was like a personal god to me, but Bentley is so awful here, it’s almost like it was some other actor who starred in American Beauty. Whattup, Wes?
Sam Elliott, of course, can do the cowboy archetype in his sleep, so he’s fine here, if sorely underutilized. (The final act the Caretaker does for Johnny is so irritating, you’d think twice about the character’s level of intelligence.)
Donal Logue meanwhile, has the thankless task of being the sidekick/semi-comedy relief, and is another sketched-in blur passing off as a character, who is given little more to do than try to talk Johnny out of doing the dangerous jumps, and interrupt his viewing of a martial arts monkey.

Now, if it seems I’m ripping into the actors, that isn’t entirely the case. I mean, who can blame them if the script they’re acting out is a turkey? (Well, maybe we can blame their agents, for getting them this gig…)
Johnson the director isn’t the only one with blood on his hands. The scriptwriter is one guilty culprit as well, and…
Oh. I see.
Johnson wrote the script too.
Well.

And you know what’s even more horrifying than the movie itself? Three things, actually.
One: Ghost Rider has so far grossed over $83 million dollars, the biggest movie of the year to date. Yet another mind-boggling mystery to add to the list.
Two: With that sort of money, Sony will definitely be thinking “sequel.” Oh, joy.
Three: Johnson is actively developing the Vertigo comic Preacher for HBO. (I think he’s writing the script for the pilot right now.)

Johnson has to be stopped.
Daredevil and Ghost Rider are the sort of comic book movies that make comic book movies look bad. Singer and Nolan and Raimi have fought hard to bring a certain legitimacy to the genre, and directors like Johnson and Tim Story (of Fantastic Four infamy) just piddle over all their hard work.
I don’t want to write off HBO’s Preacher before I see a single frame of it, but man, if it blows, I hope Garth Ennis rips Johnson a new one…

Marvel has to be stopped too.
I mean, they get lucky when it’s a Fantastic Four or a Ghost Rider: a bad movie that still, bizarrely, rakes in the dough.
I never thought I’d say this, but we need more Elektras! More bad Marvel movies that bomb at the box office.
Maybe then Marvel will wise up and take their time to get things right.