I saw "Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer" with members of its target demographic, which is to say, kids within hailing distance of their teens. They loved it. They laughed and applauded, and at the end they cheered.
They really had a good time. For those who've moved on into other demographics, however and seen a lot more movies it should be noted that this is an action flick with not a lot of action. There's virtually none in the first third, which is largely devoted to wedding-planning.
(Really.) The picture is also overloaded with CGI of a very familiar sort. The Silver Surfer himself one of the more beloved figures of the Marvel Comics universe is nothing but; and while he looks great, and the producers went to the expense of bringing in Peter Jackson's WETA Digital effects shop to help cook him up, anyone who's watched Willem Dafoe and James Franco hanging ten around Manhattan in the "Spider-Man" films for the last five years won't be inordinately impressed by his actions.
This is a super-hero sequel with a crippling lack of superness. See why the "Fantastic Four" cast thinks the Silver Surfer can win back angry fans in this video. The Fantastic Four have become a cuddlier bunch since last we saw them.
Having dispatched brainiac bad guy Victor Von Doom (Julian McMahon) in the first film, they're now looking to kick back. Stretchy-man scientist Reed Richards (the tepid Ioan Gruffudd) is about to marry the occasionally invisible Sue Storm (very blonde Jessica Alba); and walking-rockslide Ben Grimm (the affable Michael Chiklis) is in full nuzzle mode with his actually-not-just-metaphorically blind girlfriend, Alicia Masters (talented Kerry Washington, well-paid, we hope). Only Sue's fireball brother, Johnny (the better-and-better Chris Evans), remains eager for action.
Which is soon forthcoming. The big wedding is derailed when Reed gets a PDA "cosmic radiation" alert right in the middle of the ceremony. A pinballing meteor has been wreaking weirdness around the world triggering snow in Egypt, snuffing the lights in L.
A., really bad stuff. Turns out this is the Silver Surfer (mo-capped CGI star Doug Jones, of "Hellboy" and "Pan's Labyrinth"), an advance man for "Galactus, Destroyer of Worlds.
" (In the Marvel comic in which he debuted back in 1966, Galactus was an imposing badass with a complicated metal helmet; here he or it is just a computer-spawned intergalactic blizzard of the so-what variety.) After an airborne chase through New York's Holland Tunnel (a pale descendant of a similar but much cooler sequence in "Men in Black"), Johnny Storm's fiery superpower starts going haywire. It doesn't take a genius to figure out what's happened, but resident-genius Reed explains anyway: "Your encounter with the Surfer has affected your molecules.
" Why? Because the silver guy has "the ability to convert matter and energy." This sort of comic-book science would be fun if the lines were delivered with satirical snap, but the colorless Gruffudd isn't the man to do that.
Then Victor Von Doom reappears, and our hopes for the movie are momentarily stoked. (In the last film, McMahon's dastardly doings added some much-needed pizzazz to the proceedings.) That hopeful moment soon passes, though Dr.
Doom is given insufficient room to deploy his evil flamboyance. Instead he is imposed upon the Fantastic Four as a new teammate by a special-ops military commander (Andre Braugher) who's obviously unaware that movie generals have been wasting their firepower on invincible alien invaders since the 1950s. The movie limps along for a bit (it only runs 92 minutes), and finally comes to a quick and surprisingly unspectacular conclusion.
Fantasy pictures needn't be bound by the constraints of real-world logic, but they can't survive the quotidian blandness by which this one is smothered. The sunny visual design lacks drama, and the score (by John Ottman) is as perfunctory as the team's trademark superpowers (the Hulking Ben still has the ability to hold up really heavy things, and Sue Storm still excels at fancy I saw "Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer" with members of its target demographic, which is to say, kids within hailing distance of their teens.
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