This will be another short review.
One, because I don’t know that much about the Fantastic Four the comic book, and Two, because this wasn’t a very good movie and I think it takes comic book movies a step back, and we just can’t have that!

is indeed inspired by the long running Marvel Comics property about astronauts that get exposed to some radiation while in space and emerge having developed strange and wondrous powers. (Heh, I could actually hear Stan Lee’s narration when I wrote that…CAMEO ALERT…Yep, he’s in this one too.)
Team leader, brilliant scientist Reed Richards can suddenly stretch his body to outlandish proportions, and eventually is called Mr. Fantastic. Silly, huh? But that name was perfectly acceptable in 1964. Susan Storm can become invisible, and can emit a force field, and so, she becomes the Invisible Woman. She’s referred to as Invisible Girl in the movie, but I’m pretty sure that nowadays she’s a Woman in the comics... At least I THINK so. Her chipper younger brother Johnny can turn into a human flame, hence the moniker The Human Torch. And poor Ben Grimm, Reed’s best friend and everyday good guy, he gets super strength, but at what cost…he basically resembles a humanoid rock formation, and is cruelly tagged The Thing.

This movie has all that, but there’s something about the way it’s handles them that just doesn’t work well for me. I dunno if it’s because it’s too lighthearted, and the last thing we need is ANY camp in comic book related movies, or if it’s because the special effects are sub-par at best, but this movie is too flawed for me to really get behind it.
More than likely it’s the handling of Victor Von Doom, who is eventually to become Doctor Doom, that really bugs me. However I have to be very honest here and say that I do not remember the origin of Dr. Doom in the comics, so for all I know the movie did a good job. But something tells me they strayed significantly.

The film is also not very well cast, with most of the leads, Iann Gruffold, Jessica Alba, and Chris Evans, while very likable in their roles (especially Evans) not resembling their source material’s counterparts very much in appearance and / or personality. Julian McMahon’s Dr Doom is not very well written, and while he’s great on Nip/Tuck, he just doesn’t work here at all. Only Michael Chiklis really fits the bill here. He’s good as Ben Grimm, and very likable (under a ton of makeup) as The Thing.

I dunno. I wanted to like Fantastic Four a lot, and I want it to do well so that more comic book movies are made, but this just felt…cheap. It seemed to me to be the lowest achievement they could have attempted, as opposed to the superior effort I was hoping for.