Fantastic Four: Critic Reviews

Fantastic Four is terribly miscast. It's poorly written, visually uninteresting, and worst of all, boring. The film drags considerably. There are huge gaps without any action and it brings the pacing to an unbearable crawl.

This clumsy, cheesy, chintzy adaptation, with its F/X that look dated the moment you see them, is like something left over from the '60s, the heyday of Marvel's longest-running series.

Compared with the psychological probing and spiritual brooding of Batman Begins, Fantastic Four is proudly dumb, loud and inconsequential.

There's nothing terribly fantastic about this ho-hum futuristic foray.

A funky, fun film version of the famous Marvel superhero concoction.

The whole thing lacks oomph and identity.

A bad superhero comedy that takes its time going nowhere.

Before the inevitable and surprisingly anticlimactic battle with Doom, we are treated to two extreme-sports demonstrations, several training montages, [and] an ill-advised love triangle.

You don't expect realism from a comic-book movie, but you do want the characters to seem larger than life. Here, they look like contestants at a costume party.

[The writers are] so busy setting up the premise that they barely get around to exploiting it.

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

The kind of don't-ask- too-many-questions action-hero movie where the humor is tasty and the FX are wicked-cool.

The 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.

It certainly looks stunning, and there's even a try at injecting some human drama and strong emotion into the action stew.

Marvel Comics continues to empty out its stable of superheroes with this entertaining tale.

If you want to see how members of a family that's fraught with discord and dysfunction learn about teamwork and the nature of kin -- and dispatch bad guys in the process -- rent The Incredibles.

A film that's nowhere near as fantastic as it should be. Something's missing. And that something is most likely a strong director.

The radiation-altered members of the Fantastic Four don't show their humanity. Rather, the superpowered quartet is little more than a bland collection of four-color caricatures.

A wildly uneven, sporadically slapdash action-adventure that amuses in fits and starts.

A 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.

A popcorn popper, a cinematic sugar buzz. And blessedly so.

Fantastic it ain't, but not bad it sort of is.

A not-so-bad mindless bit of camp escapism that doesn't try to eclipse its dime-store comic book roots.

It exists largely to entertain and delight, which used to be precisely what summer blockbusters were engineered to do.

An 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.