Fantastic bores

Reviewed - Fantastic Four: Earlier this year, Avi Arad, the CEO of Marvel Comics' film division, persuaded Merrill Lynch, a financial house with no previous interest in masked crusaders, to support his firm in a scheme aimed at engulfing the universe with superhero adaptations.

By 2007, when Captain America and Iron Man are due, Elektra 2, X-Men 4 and The Punisher 3 should be in production. Within a decade Arad's creations may have chased all other films out of the multiplex. Dr Doom never planned anything so dastardly.

The good news is we'll still have the odd Spider-Man to look forward to. The bad news is that most of Marvel's films will probably be as shoddy, hollow and plain irritating as Fantastic Four. It hardly seems possibly that a film starring Jessica Alba as a genetic research scientist could be anything other than a laugh-riot, but Tim Story, the director of Barbershop, has managed the feat.

Mind you, the Fantastic Four always were a bit of a bore. Created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee back in the Camelot years, the crime-fighting household - Mr Fantastic eventually married The Invisible Girl, who was The Human Torch's sister - inclined towards white bread, Perry Como and touch football. They didn't even wear masks, for goodness sake. (Ben Grimm, the granite-fleshed Thing, may have been good fun, but his humour was that of the GIs who distributed nylons to land girls. No hippie dissoluteness there either.) All this was neatly satirised in The Incredibles, a picture that should have made Fantastic Four obsolete.

We are here offered a less staid, but even more irritating class of American. Johnny Storm, in particular, seems to have been gifted a new superpower: the ability to replicate the psychological effect of brittle nails scraping down a blackboard. He is now a loud-mouthed, profoundly knuckleheaded extreme sports enthusiast with a boy-band haircut and a repertoire of cheap chat-up lines. On the upside, this means that The Human Torch (for it is he) is somebody you earnestly look forward to seeing engulfed in flames.

Ioan Gruffudd, playing the stretchy Reed Richards, has had his Welsh grit replaced with the indistinct hunkiness perennially possessed by characters with alliterative names. Michael Chiklis, star of TV's The Shield, makes an acceptably gruff Ben Grimm. Julian McMahon, who is in some other telly thing, is too young and lithesome for Dr Doom. The reliably wooden Jessica Alba, though undeniably easy on the eyes, is not nearly invisible enough for my taste.

Let's not concern ourselves with the plot.