Fantastic Four 2

This movie made Spider-Man 3 look like Citizen frickin' Kane. (And, to be clear, I thought Spider-Man 3 was abyssmal.)

I've only seen bits and pieces of the first FF movie, so my strongest reactions were probably to things that everyone else has gotten used to by now... like casting. What were they thinking with Ioan Gruffud and Jessica Alba?! (The first time she did the "I'm about to use my powers" pose -- at her wedding -- I actually burst out laughing. She looked constipated.) Julian McMahon should NEVER be in this kind of movie.

Chris Evans was the only one of the 4 (or 5, if you count Doom) who was actually well cast (and thank god they didn't try to color his hair blonde!) His sexy-cocky-comedy relief routine actually worked most of the time... though the switching powers thing was completely ridiculous, and basically destroyed the Ben Grimm character. How many times were they gonna switch him back and forth without letting him go, "Wait... This is exactly what I wanted. A cure. Johnny, if you touch me again, don't expect to get that arm back."

And, of course, they totally violated the idea that the powers could only be exchanged at the end, when Johnny did his SuperSkrull routine, weilding all of their powers at once... which presumably left the other three powerless. So why couldn't he have returned Reed and Sue's powers (since they actually seem to like theirs) but not Ben's? Couldn't he touch a dying jellyfish or something?

Oh, right, we're not supposed to notice stuff like that. This is one of those movies that's hostile--very hostile--to paying close attention.

Then, there's the list of alien planets rattled off by Reed, who says he's referenced the "astrometric database." Sorry, the what now?

"Everywhere this thing has gone, life has disappeared 8 days later." Yeah, OK, that's ominous and all... but how the hell can he know that? How did he know there was life on those planets in the first place, let alone that it was gone 8 days later? Is this Earth, circa 2007 or Star Trek Voyager?

This was paint-by-numbers moviemaking, down to the incredibly hackneyed delivery of the moral at the end followed by a joke for the denoument so we go out laughing--the same stale format employed by 60s Star Trek episodes. At least the joke was actually funny, and that helped take the edge off the "what we do does matter", bad sitcom-style moralizing, which was frankly nauseating.