rated PG-13

Four good things about Fantastic Four:
1) It's no Daredevil.
2) Michael Chiklis is good as Ben Grimm, The Thing-sad and somber and quick to anger, but with a good heart. Chris Evans is a great Johnny Storm, The Human Torch, and his charisma is utterly disarming. Or maybe he's just a really good actor, playing a charismatic character. Eh, same difference. Jessica Alba (once of the TV series Dark Angel) also can't help being engaging; both she and Evans deliver lackluster lines naturally, fluidly, with twinkles in their eyes, like movie stars should.
3) The relationships between the four superheroes are well-rendered. The Fantastic Four have always been at their best as an awkward, squabbling pseudo-family, and this group of actors makes the tensions between the characters seem mostly natural and mostly real.
4) The suits look good.

Four bad things about Fantastic Four:
1) It's no Batman Begins. Both movies are almost wholly origin stories, but unlike Batman, the origin of The Fantastic Four isn't that interesting. They're exposed to cosmic radiation-a phrase that, along with "fell in a vat of chemicals" has become shorthand for a contrived superhero origin.
2) Not so much with the special effects. In fact, there's not much action at all. The first half of the movie is about the Four getting their powers; the second half is about Doom developing his. There are so few superpowered sequences that it feels like a return to the bad old days before computer animation, when there were only certain kinds of stunts that could be performed convincingly on screen. The action in the first half of the movie consists almost entirely of a long car crash.
3) Jessica Alba may be many things, but she's not blonde; Susan Storm is. Is that superficial of me? I don't mean to be shallow, it's just that... Susan Storm is very blonde. And Jessica Alba, you know, isn't. Not even with copper-colored hip-hop hair.
4) Reed Richards doesn't seem very smart. He's supposed to be the world's smartest man, and yes, we do see him writing equations on a chalkboard, which as we all know clearly marks him as smarter than you or me, but other than that... doesn't seem too smart. Kind of a doofus, really. They say it's hard to write characters smarter than you are, so I guess it stands to reason that it's probably hard to screenwrite, direct or act a character smarter than you are, too.
5) Doom really sucks. Whiny, petulant, not scary-Count Victor Von Doom! It's just sad. Oh, his IPO didn't go well-wah-wah, you big crybaby.
6) How come Jessica Alba has to take off her clothes to become invisible to slip through a crowd, but Ioan Gruffud (who plays Richards) and Evans can just sneak through? All right, I can think of a few reasons, but I mean other reasons. Stupid plot devices and continuity gaps abound.
7) Upon further reflection, no one should be named Ioan Gruffud.