Pun Salad

I put off seeing Fantastic Four due to lackluster reviews, but I read this comic a lot in college, so how long could I resist?

The good: Michael Chiklis is just about perfect as Ben Grimm, aka The Thing. He's the centerpiece of the movie, and rightfully so, since he was always, at least to my college-age mind, the most interesting of the quartet. And the special effects are pretty good.

And it was nice to see Stan Lee in a cameo. How cool must that have been, to—even in a movie—actually talk to the superheroes you helped invent?

The not-so-good: everybody else, including the venerable Dr. Doom. I mean … they're practically teenyboppers in this movie! Reed Richards was graying around the temples because he was, um, mature. (In this movie, it's due to the accident that gives the group their powers.) No doubt the script doctors claimed that having heroes and villians older than 29 would have hurt the box office. Feh!

And the dialog is beyond wooden.