Movie Review: Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
- Theatrical release date
- June 21, 2007
- DVD release date
- TBD
- Grade
- D+
It’s short, so at least it doesn’t linger long on the screen, or in one’s mind.
The best movies adapted from comic books have not only some fun and derring-do in the screenplay, they also address some timely personal or social issue. Whether it’s the alienation of the hero (Superman Returns), discrimination (X-Men), or characters carving out their independence from various father figures (Batman Begins), the adaptations that have some meat to them are the ones that stand above the rest.
The worst are those that try for such issues and fail (Daredevil). And then there are those in the middle – the ones that don’t aim at more than just being cheesy fun, with fun being the operative word. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer aims for that middle ground, but doesn’t make it. It’s not helped by a temporary lurching toward the ultra-serious in the middle when the American military is depicted as enthusiastically supporting torture.
By the way, the Army folks are all, in time-honored Hollywood fashion, complete idiots. They perform a security check on Reed Richards (Ioan Gruffudd), but somehow forget to do one on Victor Von Doom (Julian McMahon), and then they decide to trust Von Doom over Richards. Er…what? I guess an ex-billionaire terrorist who has mysteriously returned from the dead is eminently more trustworthy than the supergeek who saves America’s ass so often he can’t even get through his own wedding ceremony without being called away. Yeah, I can see that.
Ultimately, the main problem with the movie is that the only person who seems to be having any fun at all — and, remember, that IS the point — is Chris Evans as Johnny Storm. The rest of the cast play their parts with all the joy of prisoners on death row. Even McMahon appears to wish Von Doom had stayed in stasis, and if the only human bad guy in the movie can’t gleefully chew some scenery, what good is he?
Our four heroes spend the movie being selfish pricks, especially Sue Storm (Jessica Alba), who insists her fiance give up saving the world in order to finish planning their wedding, and who later makes plans to split up the foursome altogether. Richards wants to save the world and make his bride happy (these two things are apparently incompatible) so of course he does what any supersmart scientist would do — he lies to the woman he loves. At least Johnny delights, rather than wallows, in his own shallowness.
The plot, such as it is, is as shallow as the characters. Earth is going to be destroyed by a giant hungry space cloud eight days after the first appearance of the Surfer. How Richards is able to grab these vital bits of data from his analysis of “cosmic radiation” is never explained. What good his analysis does is also unclear, since no one starts a countdown and, in fact, once Richards announces this horrific deadline, everyone appears to forget about it. Now, if my planet were about to be eaten by a space monster, I’d be obsessively watching the skies. However, no one in this movie can stop navel-gazing long enough to look up until it’s too late.
The redemption of Earth happens, not because the Fantastic Four learn how to work as a team and gain respect for each other, but for the sole reason that Sue Storm reminds the Silver Surfer of his distant love (I ask you, what are the odds?). This cosmic coincidence prompts him to fight off the giant cloud while the Fantastic Four watch. Whew! Glad they left the final battle to the expert.
And a final aside to the folks at 20th Century Fox: whoever thought disguising the normally beautiful Jessica Alba as a blonde bridezilla needs to have their head examined. Alba sports the worst wig and hair color ever, and those blue contacts are seriously creepy. Seriously.
Copyright . Published 1 July 2007 in What’s New.
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