In the world of comic-book movie franchises, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer is the big-screen equivalent of a multi-issue story, complete with an earth-shaking finale that will be all but forgotten by the next installment.
Even comic-books fans, however, wouldn't put up with the ridiculous domestic drama in this chapter. Reed Richards (Ioan Gruffudd), the world's most brilliant (by his own modest appraisal) and most elastic scientist, blows off the signs of an impending Armageddon to focus on his wedding plans. He even has to sneak away from his bride-to-be, Sue (Jessica Alba, bronzed and blond and, at times, invisible), to track the extraterrestrial guided missile currently buzzing the planet and sinking craters into the center of the Earth.
The Silver Surfer was the most existential comic-book creation of the 1960s and his appearance in the film is the closest that director Tim Story gets to visual awe. Actor Doug Jones (lacquered in CGI quicksilver) and voice artist Laurence Fishburne provide the supersonic skyboarder with the dignity and gravity, if not quite the philosophical depth, of his inspiration.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF FOX
The same can't be said for the rest of the cast, though at least the brash hotshot Johnny Storm (Chris Evans), aka the Human Torch, and gravel-voiced rock-face Ben Grimm (Michael Chiklis), offer a little personality to the banal dialogue and flavorless direction. For her part, Alba can't even play dead with conviction, but she does look good in skintight costumes.
Julian McMahon returns as the Four's imperious arch-nemesis, Doctor Doom. McMahon again mistakes sneering and smug for darkly threatening. By the time he clambers onto the silver surfboard for a final smackdown with the colorful quartet over China, bouncing off the Great Wall and smashing Beijing, he resembles nothing more than a mirror-ball knockoff of Spider-Man's Green Goblin.
The film gets whiplash jerking from the sober magnitude of the epic effects spectacle (much of it impressive, if dramatically inert) to slapstick super gags (most of them awkward and juvenile), and Story can't sustain anything resembling a mood, let alone a sense of importance.
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer is diverting, at times even visually impressive (give the crew credit for an inspired and magnificent re-interpretation of the planet-eating Galactus), but has neither the spirit or style of Spider-Man nor the ambition of X-Men. Behind the dutifully executed spectacle is just another episode tossed off to meet a deadline.
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