The story centers around a newly introduced villain, The Silver Surfer, who is this shiny naked guy who looks like he's made out of liquid mercury.

Surfer, surfing on a...surfboard...surfs into town leaving strange weather patterns in his wake.

What could be wrong? Why is he doing this? Why is the Surfer naked and shiny?

Sounds boring doesn't it? It was.

In fact, it put me to sleep twice. But the Fantastic Four is excited, and will find out what gives, and put things right with the world.

The tricky part with these comic book movies, is to create that hightened form of reality. 'Spider-Man 2' captured it nicely.

In this world, the Fantastic Four run around and use their powers to save the planet, but the settings, althought they're supposed to be London, or Egypt or Los Angeles, seem 2-dimensional.

Speaking of 2-dimensional, Ioan Gruffudd [Reed Richards], Michael Chiklis [The Thing], and Jessica Alba [Sue Storm] are all very wooden and strangely flat in their portrayals. In some scenes, the script is so thin and the performances so low energy, it almost feels like a rehearsal. 'Great Jessica, let's do it for real now!'

Alba is beautiful, but also very unconvincing in her obvious blonde wig, and blue color contact lenses. I can think of a dozen other blonde actresses in Hollywood who could look the part, and act it better than Alba. She seems to get most of the screen time.

Chris Evans [Johnny Storm] brings a fun, smart-alecky vigor to his role, and Julian McMahon [Victor Von Doom], who always does well with creepy, smug egomaniacs, also turns in a fine performance.

Silver Surfer is voiced by Laurence Fishburne -- with a slow, peculiar monotone pattern to his speech. Okay, he's an alien, but heck, he makes HAL-9000 seem rowdy and out of control.

The coolest gadget was a newly designed Fantasticar. [left]

Complete with a DODGE logo on the front, it's a surprisigly sleek looking vehicle which then splits off into four parts, allowing the Four to do battle independently.

It's very convincing.

Special effects are of course fantastic too. With digital computer graphics, the London Eye ferris wheel collapses, Silver Surfer flies through buildings, snow falls on the Great Pyramids, Johnny Storm and The Thing exchange powers and looks, and this giant smoke thing envelopes the earth, threatening to destroy it.

But so what?

If you don't have a strong enough story to make an audience care about your characters, and the whole thing doesn't have any basis in reality, then the expensive CGI is all for naught.

Back in the 70s, Christopher Reeve brought Superman to life and we really did believe a man can fly, because we cared about those characters.

Hopefully, Stan Lee will remember this as he moves forward with his new projects at Disney.

I kind of liked it. Costumes were really good. I think Jessica Alba is good, and she's pretty. Johnny Storm is hot. [ha-ha! get it? hot!] The story was confusing to me, but overall, I thought it was okay.

I enjoyed it. It was nice to not have to worry about it being inappropriate for my 12-almost-13 year old daughter. But it was a bit boring too. It's one of those easy-to-watch summertime movies, in a cool theater with your favorite candy.

I fell asleep -- twice -- in this movie. Action sequences do not equate with excitement. [see: Star Wars: Episode 2, or Batman]. Comic book movies are not easy. 'The Fantastic Four' isn't one of the great ones.

Check out our other movie review --