‘Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer’

Despite the cast’s credentials, the driving engine is an army of technicians, slaving away over glowing screens to make everything look, well, fantastic.

By: Bob Brown

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The Silver Surfer bears down on New York City in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.


   Let’s be blunt about this at the outset: Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer is aimed squarely at the 12- to 14-year-old set. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s the kind of summer movie where parents can drop their kids off and shop the mall. If they want to make it a family affair, that’s OK too. But unlike the sometimes conflicted Spider-Man, comics maven Stan Lee did not produce this quartet with adults in mind.
   These four super heroes are all reasonably well-adjusted and comfortable in their skin-tight uniforms. That means their lives are a tad boring unless a world-threatening evil power gives them a mess to clean up. Talk about domestic drama, Reed Richards aka Mr. Fantastic (Ioan Gruffudd) and Sue Storm aka Invisible Woman (Jessica Alba) are about to wed. But a mysterious force is slowly killing the planet by boring huge holes into the earth’s mantle. What is it, where is it, and will it keep Reed and Sue from choosing a silver pattern?
   They don’t know, but we do: Something silver this way comes — on a surfboard no less. And it’s bearing down on New York City. With her bare hands, Sue can create force fields strong enough to halt falling helicopters. That’s a cinch compared to keeping her fiancé’s mind focused on the nuptials and off the fate of the planet.
   To further complicate their lives, Sue’s brother Johnny aka Human Torch (Chris Evans) got his molecules scrambled when he had a close encounter with the Silver Surfer. Now, anytime he touches one of his Fantastic partners, they swap superpowers — Ben Grimm aka The Thing (Michael Chiklis) can snap his fingers into flames and Johnny’s body turns into a muscled-bound rock pile.
   But the silver guy (Doug Jones, with the speaking voice of Laurence Fishburne) is only a harbinger of the real consuming power, Galactus, in the form of a planet-eating cloud, a force of nature. It’s a real bore, with no holds barred. The evil Victor Von Doom (Julian McMahon) wants to hitch his wagon to this menacing force and justify having come back from the dead (his return surprises the Four, who thought he had been dispatched in the last episode. Comic book villains never die, they just smell funny).
   As with the Fantastic Four (2005), the same cast and crew are back, including director Tim Story, who felt some obligation the first time around as one of Hollywood’s few African-American directors. He is quoted on the Internet Movie Database Web site saying, "A few people called me about the black thing and said: ‘This is major. You’re a black director on "Fantastic Four."’ But all I was thinking was: ‘I just don’t want to screw up.’ But then people were like, ‘If you screw this up, we all got a problem,’ and I said, ‘Oh, man, I got that on me now?’"
   Some critics panned Fantastic Four, but Story needn’t have worried. That movie made over $300 million worldwide, the true measure of studio success. Hence this movie sequel, and Story has done somewhat better by the material. It’s a compilation of various issues in the Marvel Comics Fantastic Four series, but it’s notably less violent than other Marvel-based movies, earning a quite mild PG.
   John Ottman, a veteran of many a superhero film score (X2, Superman Returns, Fantastic Four), returns to kick it up a notch. As always, despite the cast’s thespian credentials, the driving engine of these comics-turned-movies is an army of anonymous digital technicians, slaving away over glowing screens to make everything look, well, fantastic.
   Lee himself makes an amusing cameo as a spurned wedding guest who doesn’t have an engraved invitation to Richard and Sue’s wedding, despite insisting he is Stan Lee (as if cartoon characters can step out of their fiction to recognize their creator).
   All in all, this is the kind of movie that thrives in the heat of summer but would wither in the cold competition of a later season. It’s pure fluff, just a light entertainment for its targeted audience, and a money machine for its studio. It would be curmudgeonly to judge it ill on any other basis. Don’t even try to criticize its lack of adherence to the comic originals. Producer Stan Lee knows what he’s doing. Hey, gang, silver surf’s up.
Rated PG for sequences of action violence, some mild language and innuendo.