Movie Review: Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
A couple of years ago, Fantastic Four arrived and wasted every ounce of time it had in developing characters who didn’t even want the powers that a moviegoer paid to see. So I was floored when the sequel basically went through the motions again for an hour before giving the audience what they want.Â
In Rise of the Silver Surfer, director Story and Simpsons vet Don Payne and the original’s co-writer Mark Frost spend a lot of time showing us that Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic (Ioan Gruffudd) and Sue Storm/Invisible Girl (Jessica Alba) are getting married, and along with her brother Johnny Storm/Human Torch (Chris Evans) and Ben Grimm/The Thing (Michael Chiklis), they’ve been dealing with superhero fame. The wedding is cut short by the anomaly of The Silver Surfer (Doug Jones, voiced by Laurence Fishburne), which comes to serve as a beacon for the planet-eating Galactus.
All the elements are here for a kickass sci-fi comic book flick, but re-entering the picture is Victor Von Doom (Julian McMahon), left for dead in the last picture and totally bringing down the intrigue the movie could have had without him. He is once again pretty much the main villain, the whole coolness of the Silver Surfer and his struggle with good and evil and the supernatural Galactus really just a means by which Von Doom annoyingly makes his return. Â
The trailer for this movie has been promising the Silver Surfer and how cool he is for many months, only to basically drop the ball when he finally shows up for a significant amount of time onscreen. There are moments where I felt like the movie was going to take off (only in the last thirty minutes of a very short adventure), but they were only moments. It’s better than the first movie, but once again, where it decides to spend its time was not beneficial to me.
It’s a shame…could have been a classic.
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Comment from KW
Time: June 15, 2007, 9:00 pm
That sucks. But I’m not surprised. Which also sucks.