Fantastic Four begins quite promisingly, with a schoolboy standing up in front of his classmates and telling them about the science experiment he's conducting in his garage.
He's trying to build a teleporter that will beam human beings from one location to another, like in Star Trek.
As you'd expect, his schoolmates laugh and his teacher tells him to stop fibbing, but one boy's curiosity is piqued. This is Ben Grimm and the science nerd turns out to be Reed Richards, a brainiac to rival Albert Einstein.
They become friends and later, when Reed builds his machine and the two of them volunteer as guinea pigs, they're turned into The Thing (Jamie Bell) and Mister Fantastic (Miles Teller).
The trouble is, we have to wait for nearly an hour before this transformation takes place and, in the meantime, we're treated to endless scenes of Reed tinkering about in his laboratory — staring into a computer terminal, brandishing a welding torch and gazing longingly at Susan Storm (Kate Mara), his beautiful colleague.
Sir Tim Hunt's alleged views about how distracting female scientists can be are right on the money, according to this film.
While most superhero movies would get these early parts of the narrative out of the way as quickly as possible so the action can begin, Fantastic Four gets bogged down in them and doesn't give itself enough time to focus on the meat of the story.
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