Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer Release Date: June 15, 2007 Starring: Jessica Alba, Michael Chiklis, Chris Evans, Ioan Gruffudd, Kerry Washinton, Andre Braugher, Julian McMahon, Doug Jones, Laurence Fishburne Directed by: Tim Story
Against seemingly insurmountable odds, a hopelessly lame director, and a largely problematic cast among them, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer turns out to be one of the more pleasant surprises of this blockbuster summer. It's a decent comic-book movie that delivers its goods with good humor and a minimum of bloat. It's such an improvement over the leaden introductory film that I'm moderately looking forward to a third installment.
Credit for the improvement has to go…well, I don't know exactly where, as the team that made the first film is pretty much intact. Screenwriter Mark Frost teams here with Don Payne rather than Michael France, but that's about the only major difference. Maybe the fact that all the exposition and how-do-you-dos are out of the way and now we can get to the business of the Fant-Four being a superhero team unimpeded by anything except what's threatening the Earth at whatever given moment.
Of course, anybody who grew up on the Marvel comic (and I admit I did) knows that it was never thus — that being a real Fantastic Four fan involved getting genuinely caught up in the various fissures between egghead stretcher Reed Richards (Gruffudd), conflicted paramour Invisible Girl Sue Storm (Alba), her hotheaded sibling Human Torch Johnny (Evans), and embittered orange crush freakzoid Ben "The Thing" Grimm (Chiklis). In this picture, said fissures are largely confined to Reed and Sue's inability to stage an uninterrupted wedding, and their plans to split up the old gang after saving the planet just one last time. The rest of the picture is a streamlined adaptation of one of the classic storylines from Marvel's Golden Age, wherein the sleek sentinel the Silver Surfer (embodied here by Hellboy/Pan's Labyrinth supermime Jones, and voiced by Fishburne), an advance man for the planet-eater Galactus, causes global havoc with his world-suitability testing, and forces a showdown not only with the Four, but with their sworn nemesis Victor Von Doom (McMahon) — not to mention the ever-unhelpful U.S. military (largely represented by a steely Braugher).
All this is accomplished quite briskly and brightly, albeit at some cost to comic-book creators Stan Lee's and Jack Kirby's original conceptions — the Surfer in unadulterated form was really a brilliant bit of counterculture id, in that he was an ultimate alienated loner cum wet noodle who could, as it happened, lay waste to a universe if you ticked him off — but you can't have everything. While Gruffudd remains an uncommonly bland genius, and Alba, while never less than fetching, simply does not register as a blue-eyed blonde (the combination of dye and contacts with her complexion and features instead makes her come off as the hottest preoperative transsexual who ever walked the earth), Evans is suitably cocky, and Chiklis continues to convince that he was born to be Ben Grimm. And coming in at way less than two hours, let alone the near-epic lengths of Spider-Man 3 and Pirates ditto, this will be a tonic for all except those who are chronically addicted to movie theater air-conditioning.
