WEEKEND REVIEW OF THE FANTASTIC FOUR REBOOT

2015 rating: **

There's a term in golf where, after screwing up your first shot i.e. the drive, you get to throw down another ball for another try. So what we have here is a FANTASTIC FOUR "Mulligan", and yet the first attempt, co-starring the now CAPTAIN AMERICA Chris Evans, wasn't too shabby with an engaging origin story: taking the group from a million dollar lab into space and back to Earth, where, with a superhero collective that can stretch, vanish, flame, and destroy, the sky was the limit...

Well this sky is beyond limited. In fact, after a fairly interesting childhood glance into Reed Richard's dream of teleportation and his down-home friend Ben Grimm, we only experience what happens in the lab and then in an eerie inner-space realm where the gang accidentally goes from human to freaks. Meanwhile, hardly any time is spent dealing with the pros and cons of having such eclectic powers amongst mortals... In fact, right as things get rolling, we skip to ONE YEAR LATER as the group is already working for the military, going through the motions and having no fun at all. 

There's a ray of dark hope in Von Doom's nefarious changeling, taking over with heated vengeance and putting the good guys in check... But he too, like everyone and everything else, remains so contained and constricted, hardly anything actually happens at all (and note to anyone making the next F4 movie... the guy playing the guy who turns into The Thing should be a big strong guy to begin with, unlike here)... .