Toys: "The Fantastic Four: First Steps"

Third time's the charm, or is it just that the two previous attempts to push the Fantastic Four as a cinematic proposition (2005, with Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba and a pre-Captain America Chris Evans; 2015, with Miles Teller, Jamie Bell and a pre-Black Panther Michael B. Jordan) set such a dismally low bar that First Steps is getting an easy ride? From the new movie's opening act, you take away a sense of how much of a struggle it must be to launch or relaunch these characters, given the baggage the IP has accrued and the crushing weight of fanboy expectation. The choice Marvel's producers make this time isn't to rehash the origin story, but to approach the Four, like their studio's heyday, as a thing of the past. Cue 1960s styling, fonts and production design; cue a TV prologue, hosted by Mark Gatiss's Ted Gilbert and shown on a period variant of Disney affiliate ABC, which marks the Four's fourth anniversary as a team and montages together several event movies' worth of Earth-saving action. It's not the worst idea, allowing First Steps to cut to the chase and get one more franchise up and running without unnecessarily laborious exposition. Yet the centralisation of television in this process seems a giveaway: this is, essentially, the sitcom version of the Fantastic Four (replete with laboured running gag about the Thing's catchphrase), composed along much the same lines as those shows Marvel fell back on as their movies began to stutter and stall. The director is Matt Shakman, who cut his teeth on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia before cleaning up with WandaVision; the general vibe is The Gang Goes Retro, or Back to Superhero Basics.

Possibly these characters only work within a Sixties setting, as cheery relics of an era before America and its comics got neurotic. Even in this milieu, however, they verge on the bland: astronauts who've made peace with the bad thing that happened to them up in space, and now shrug onwards with the business of intergalactic troubleshooting and problem-solving. (No prizes for guessing why Marvel's executive class consider them an ongoing concern.) They are headed, in this latest iteration, by stretchy scientist Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), whose defining characteristic is a rakish matinee-idol moustache; also along for the ride is his other half Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), whose defining characteristic is being pregnant with the couple's first child; Sue's flying, flame-retardant brother Johnny (Joseph Quinn), the one out of Stranger Things who's become an improbable heartthrob; and the clan's pebbledashed pet the Thing (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), who has rocks for a head. As underlined by Sue's big midfilm speech about the importance of family, it's all very basic and heteronormative, ideal for a Trump 2.0 summer release; even its Thing is relatively average-sized. (A token subplot - all but a one-scene, felt-tip outline in this script, left to be coloured in by future instalments - finds Moss-Bachrach romancing schoolmarm Natasha Lyonne, who's had her hair straightened and all her quirks surgically removed.)

Yet these supernormies tend to get lost when set against a typically busy CG backdrop of rockets, wormholes and other galaxies; in their matching spacesuits, they could be anyone, and in one shot that pitches them at the feet of towering big bad Galactus, the Destroyer of Worlds, they come over as not so much fantastic as four teeny-tiny pixels at the very bottom of the frame. (The actors, inevitably, appear far happier unhelmeted on the lab-playroom-studio set where the characters all live together, like the Monkees or Banana Splits.) Every other shot in this way bears witness to the marked scaling-down of ambition at Marvel after several chastening failures; if First Steps holds any real interest, it lies in watching creatives trying to find a happy halfway house between the summer blockbusters the company used to turn out in their sleep and the season finales to which the Marvel diehards have long since gravitated. Shakman shakes out one half-decent, semi-resonant image - Galactus stretching Reed Richards between his fingers with the smile of a malevolent child - but even that speaks mostly to the way a TV show has been stretched into a feature, and the comparatively limited elasticity of the Marvel Studios imagination. The finale is, once again, Thanos in an Iron Man suit smashing up Manhattan to the strains of a Michael Giacchino score, and a fakeout death that doesn't matter because there's no such thing as an end in the Marvel universe. (The coda is a fifth anniversary TV special in which Gatiss-as-Gilbert explicitly tells the viewer you've seen it all before, and you'll see it all again: same time same channel, suckers.) Again, the experience is like watching someone playing with plastic action figures; the only novelty is that Shakman keeps his toys in a facsimile of the original packaging. They're certainly very shiny for that - but couldn't somebody have thought of something more involving to do with them?

The Fantastic Four: First Steps is now playing in cinemas nationwide.