FANTASTIC FOUR

This is a superhero movie that moves. It hits its comic-book beats briskly, gets some real laughs, and captures the flavor of the source material well enough. That's the case for it.

The case against it is just as plain. The story is thin, the lead performances are wooden, and the characters never earn the depth this cast of heroes deserves — especially next to sharper comic adaptations like the X-Men films. Underneath the jokes sits a strongly evolutionary, humanist worldview, including two lines played for laughs that mock God directly. Add sexual innuendo, a character forcibly stripped and shown in her underwear, and violence too intense for younger viewers, and this becomes a film for grown-ups to weigh, not a family movie night pick.

If you're an adult who enjoys comic-book action and doesn't mind a humanist worldview riding along with the jokes, this is a fine rental. If you're choosing for kids under 13, choose something else.

Dr. Reed Richards wants to study a cosmic storm from an old rival's space station — and talks his rival, Victor Von Doom, into the trip. Richards brings along his best friend Ben, his former love Sue, and her hotheaded pilot-brother Johnny. When the storm hits early, it changes every one of them.

Reed can stretch and reshape himself at will. Sue can turn invisible and control force fields. Johnny catches fire. Ben becomes something no longer entirely human. What each of them does with a life suddenly rewritten is where the story goes from here.

Three stars means this earns real, if limited, credit. The film moves briskly, hits the right comic-book plot points, and lands some genuinely funny lines — it captures much of the source comics' flavor.

But it's a thin story, and it shows. The lead performances, particularly Ioan Gruffudd's Reed Richards, come across as wooden and distanced from both their characters and the audience. The characters never get the development the X-Men films managed with a similar-sized ensemble. It's a movie that entertains in the moment and evaporates almost immediately after — competent, brisk, forgettable.

This film runs on a strongly evolutionary, humanist engine. Reed Richards's whole premise is that a cosmic storm once turned early humans into homo sapiens, and another storm might now fix mankind's problems — evolution not just as biology but as salvation. That's the water this story swims in, and it surfaces in two specific jokes: one character says God hates another character, and another jokes that God is a woman. Both are played for laughs, but they're aimed at Scripture's God, not at nothing.

There's real good to weigh against that. The story does turn, eventually, on a recognizable moral shape — good confronting evil, ordinary people choosing to unite against a genuinely dangerous man. That's not nothing, even wrapped in a comic-book B-movie.

Underneath the mutations and the jokes is a familiar ache: what do you do when your body, your identity, your whole self is suddenly not what it was? Ben's transformation costs him his marriage; each of the four has to learn who they are now. Scripture answers that ache differently than a cosmic storm does — not with an accident that remakes you, but with a Creator who made you on purpose: "So God created man in his own image" (Genesis 1:27).

There's a fun, brisk comic-book movie buried in here, and it's worth acknowledging when a critique like ours also says so. But a thin script, wooden performances, and a worldview that jokes about God while preaching evolution as savior mean this isn't one to build a family night around. Same answer we opened with: wait for home — adults only. Looking for something the whole family can watch together instead? Start with our latest family-friendly picks.