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Last weekend, esrblog and I went to see the latest Fantastic 4 movie.

No spoiler cuts are necessary for any review of this one, because in overall mediocrity it was a lot like the original one two years ago.

Ioan Gruffudd, as Mr. Fantastic, made a valiant but doomed effort to be convincing in his role despite the comic-book thinness of the script. Jessica Alba, as Sue Storm, his financee, did a reprise of her unconvincing I-just-wanna-be-a-regular-all-American-girl performance from the first movie, while Chris Evans and Michael Chiklis as Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm did amiable, sit-com level comic relief.

Doug Jones, playing the Silver Surfer with the aid of Laurence Fishburne's voice, gave the most convincing performance of the movie. esrblog, who once followed the Marvel comics on which these movies have been based closely, claims that the plot was surprisingly true to the original comics. He was particularly hostile to Alba's performance, which he dissed as "plastic", and he considers her unattractive.

Overall, not an awful movie, nor a great one. If you're not a big Marvel fan, wait till it comes out on DVD and get it from Netflix or something, and save yourself $10.

Why I didn't post anything about "Batman Begins" or "Fantastic Four", it's because I enjoyed both movies. Neither of them had any feature that was awful enough to make me want to complain (wittily) about it, and neither was great enough to be worth raving about.

Though I will say I enjoyed watching Christian Bale take on the entire world from his Bat Cave. And I could watch Ioan Gruffudd on screen all day no matter how awful the rest of the movie was. Mmmmm.