Grade: D

In returning to the well of Marvel Comic superhero characters for inspiration, Twentieth Century Fox bypasses the single characters (like Daredevil and Elektra) that have served the studio as poorly in the past as they’ve done other studios (Universal with The Hulk, New Line with The Punisher–only Sony really hit the bull’s eye with Spider-Man), and instead tries to duplicate its successful X-Man formula with this even older team of amazing characters. The Fantastic Four were created back in 1961 as Marvel’s answer to DC’s Justice League, and their title has been published without interruption since then. On the basis of this initial feature showcase (aside from an unreleased cheapie in the mid-nineties), however, it’s doubtful whether they’ll have the same longevity on the screen as they’ve had on the printed page.

The quartet consists of a group of astronauts endowed with a variety of special powers as a result of exposure to mysterious space radiation. They include Mr. Fantastic (Ioan Gruffudd), an earnest, intense scientist named Reed Richards who’s become an elastic man; siblings Johnny and Sue Storm (Chris Evans and Jessica Alba), he a hot-shot action-lover and she a hottie scientist, who are transformed into the fiery Human Torch and the elusive Invisible Girl; and hearty pilot Ben Grimm (Michael Chiklis), close buddy of Reed, who becomes the permanently Hulk-ing rock-man The Thing. Reluctantly banding together to form a squad of superheroes without secret identities after Johnny’s exhibitionism and Ben’s very public depression get them a notoriety most never wanted, and intent on trying to reverse the process, they confront their first menace in the form of Dr. Doom (Julian McMahon).

Doom represents the major deviation, as it were, from the comic story in that he’s no longer the wickedly imperialistic ruler of an imaginary country called Latveria but one of the original space crew, a nasty billionaire industrialist who’s always been a rival of Reed’s (for scientific recognition as well as Sue’s heart) and who, as the owner-operator of the ship that takes the mission into space, also suffers the radiation blast but is made even more evil by its effects when he’s turned into a sort of ugly titanium man. (To be fair, he is still portrayed–somewhat oddly–as a native of Latveria, but little is made of it until a close that both swipes its visuals from “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and is obviously designed to invite a sequel.) Our intrepid new heroes thus will not only have to overcome the divisions Doom has sewn among them but use their new powers in tandem to foil Doom’s dastardly plot to divide and conquer them and then presumably–you guessed it–take over the world.

This is all ultra-silly stuff, of course, which even on the printed colored page has always seemed both derivative and second-rate, but theoretically it could have been dumb fun as a movie. Unfortunately, the filmmakers–scripters Michael France (“Hulk,” “The Punisher”) and Mark Frost (“Twin Peaks”) and director Tim Story (“Taxi”)–succeed in getting only the dumb part right, omitting the fun entirely. In their hands “Fantastic Four” is a succession of chintzy-looking action scenes punctuated by exposition sequences of stunning puerility; the writing–which consists of laughable scientific jargon, juvenile jibes, slobbering romantic drivel, stentorian super-hero cliche and–heaven help us!–human interest smarminess (the movie actually wants to make us care about these “misfits of nature”!)–is so moldy and echt-cartoonish that it actually makes the dialogue that appears in speech bubbles in the comic sound profound.

Presumably the intention was to maintain the cheesy goofiness of the old books, but the result is frankly something that comes perilously close to the campiness of the old “Batman” TV series, but with incongruously sappy elements added to the mix. (The encounters between The Grimm Thing and the wife who’s unable to accept what he’s become are worse even than the “intimate” moments between Richards and Sue.) The B-movie quality is accentuated by the no-star casting. Gruffudd, who cut a stalwart figure as A&E’s Horatio Hornblower, looks a bit embarrassed playing a character that might be marketed by Rubbermaid (of course, maybe it’s just his interpretation of the character’s emotional shyness), while Chiklis, who’s sort of like a gruff second-string replacement for Bruce Willis in human form, can’t do much when encased in his Thing outfit–though his having only four fingers on each hand is at least true to the cartoon bible. Alba is so strikingly lovely that one regrets her playing the figure that disappears on a regular basis, but Evans proves all too convincingly obnoxious as her jokey, prankster brother. Unfortunately, the movie lacks the strong villain it would need to work on its own goofy level. Dr. Doom, especially after his dons his metal mask, comes across like a bargain-basement Skeletor from the old He-Man cartoon (itself made into a dreadful live-action movie back in 1987), and his powers are never defined, so that he seems a cut-rate version of Magneto from “X-Men.” McMahon, moreover, plays him with a kind of generic Snidely Whiplash sneer, so that he’s never really interesting or amusing anyway. On the technical side, the movie is apparently aiming for an affectionately phony look, but the effects don’t achieve the outrageous looniness that’s presumably the goal, and the rather garish cinematography by Oliver Wood is frequently hard on the eye. Even the score by the John Ottman sounds tinny and weak.

The moral for Marvel in all this? “Spider-Man 4,” definitely. “Fantastic Four,” one is more than enough.

Grade: D

It’s truly frightening. Not the old Gaston Leroux novel about the mysterious figure that haunts the Paris Opera–that’s more camp than classic. Nor any of the myriad versions of it that have been made for the big screen or television–not even the 1925 Lon Chaney epic, which remains great fun but is hardly terrifying. No, what’s really frightening are two names–Andrew Lloyd Webber and Joel Schumacher. Each alone is sufficient to cause an involuntary shudder in anybody with an iota of good taste. But the thought of them combined ups the effect exponentially. It’s the mixture of Lloyd Webber’s slick banality and Schumacher’s wild flamboyance that makes this long-gestating filmization of the inexplicably successful stageshow, which has been playing nonstop on Broadway since 1988 and spawned a small army of touring companies, so frightful in every sense of the word. On the boards “The Phantom of the Opera” was bloated kitsch; now, thanks to Schumacher, it’s hysterically bloated kitsch.

With some rearranging–the famous chandelier crash is moved from the first act close to the big finale, for example–and some not-always well-advised additions, like periodic returns to the later period in which the show begins before flashing back to the central story, the movie is a quite faithful transposition of the stage musical to the screen. Certainly none of the sung-through score appears to have been cut. That’s not much of a blessing, however, since Lloyd Webber’s habit of endlessly repeating his limited number of melodies gets tiresome even if one likes them the first time around (Wagner didn’t apply the leitmotif principle with such dedication) and the lyrics are even more puerile than remembered. Nor is there any significant alteration in the goofily romantic, Beauty-and-the-Beast retread he fashioned from Leroux’s gorier potboiler. The tale of the disfigured genius who lives in the catacombs beneath the Opera and tutors a young member of the chorus whom he intends to make not only the company’s star soprano but his lover as well–only to have his hopes shattered when her childhood friend, the nobleman Raoul, becomes his romantic rival–remains hokum in the purest form, suffused with music that’s a potpourri of elements, from faux opera to patter songs reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan to big Broadway ballads. Still, audiences have responded with rapturous acceptance to what should, if quality were the determining factor, have been a floperetta (to use the Broadway jargon), so the content of this “Phantom” will hardly displease the already addicted. (Whether it will expand the current fan base is entirely another question: newcomers are unlikely to be bowled over by the gooey mixture of schmaltz and throbbing emotionalism).

The more serious question is how well Schumacher’s picture presents the material. It’s certainly a lush production, in which the design (Anthony Pratt, John Fenner, Paul Kirby), sets (Celia Bobak) and costumes (Alexandra Byrne) are all very opulent (though often excessively busy) and the cinematography (John Mathieson) equally plummy. But what’s going on in front of all the elaborate backdrops is less impressive. The three leads sing well enough, but none exhibits any real charisma. Gerard Butler makes a curiously bland Phantom, never mustering the commanding presence that’s needed; and Patrick Wilson can’t give much to the stock figure of Raoul (certainly one of the most inept excuses for a hero ever created) beyond a boyish handsomeness. As for Emmy Rossum as Christine Daae, the female member of the romantic triangle, she evinces a winsome look but a plastic personality–the role might as well be played by a wax statue from Madame Tussaud’s. Meanwhile the usually forceful Miranda Richardson is almost anonymous as Christine’s guardian Mme. Giry. One shouldn’t blame the actors overmuch, though, since they’re hostage to Schumacher’s conception–and he, remember, is the fellow who destroyed the “Batman” franchise with his odd penchant for melding long dull patches with hyper-stylized and hyper-kinetic bursts of splashy razzmatazz. Here we find a similarly peculiar blend. Large portions of “Phantom” (big duets especially) are staged at a somber, almost glacial pace, but elsewhere–especially in the bigger production numbers–Schumacher and editor Terry Rawlings opt for a kind of rapid over-cutting that spotlights some really bizarre inserts. The worst examples are two of the show’s poorest songs, “Masquerade” and “Point of No Return,” both of which are made so jagged by the pointless exhibitionism of the camerawork that they become visually exhausting. (The repeated cutaways to the oddly-costumed dancers in the latter number–who look like refugees from an S&M bar–are particularly clumsy, and rather ugly.)

So are there any pleasures to be found in this “Phantom”? Of course. Minnie Driver manages some easy laughs as the company’s reigning Italian diva, a prima donna in every sense of the term. And Simon Callow and Ciaran Hinds have a field day as the Opera’s new owners, providing a desperately needed spark (and a rare sense of fun) to the proceedings in their patter songs. The sound is excellent, too, for which Tony Dawe, Andy Nelson and Anna Behlmer are responsible. That’s not an insignificant element in a project like this.

But on the whole while devotees may be satisfied, it’s probable that most viewers coming to “The Phantom of the Opera” for the first time are going to leave wondering what all the fuss has been about for the last two decades. The picture opens with a scene set in 1919, where the remnants of the company are being sold off at auction; and one of the items on the block is the wreckage of the chandelier that came crashing down in what’s described as “the famous disaster” of forty-nine years earlier. Perhaps down the line in 2053 people will be using the identical words to hearken back to this big, bombastic bore of a movie, which isn’t likely to be of any help in reviving the movie musical–a genre which, despite “Chicago,” is still on life support.