Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (’07 review)

1 outta 5

When I sat down to watch Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, I thought “Okay, Director Tim Story, try and wow me.”  This was a cynical response to having suffered through the original Fantastic Four movie.  However, shockingly, the opening of this sequel immediately wowed me.  The first shot involves a planet being sucked dry and exploding, all in a single take.  Now that is a solid way to draw in your viewers.  So, yes, Tim Story shut my big stupid mouth and did something awe inspiring and awesome me right off the bat.  Then the rest of the movie happened.  And it pretty much stunk. However, it is better than its predecessor.  The last flick was as enjoyable as being kicked in the crotch.  This is as enjoyable as being punched in the face. 

The problem is really the tone, which, like the 1st movie, still feels like a ‘50s sitcom with some cheap FX.  Not pretty FX.  Rubbery-looking, badly rendered FX.  The entire cast is mugging uncontrollably in every scene like its amateur night at the famed Apollo theatre.  When this movie has a dance sequence with Reed Richards (Ioan Gruffudd), and the dancing in Spider-Man 3 was a lot better, you KNOW Fantastic Four is in trouble.   (It is interesting to note that the past two Marvel comic book adaptations have involved dance sequences with its main leads.  One wonders if the next Marvel movie in the pipe, 2008’s Iron Man, will continue this trend and we’ll see Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark cutting a rug.  Considering how he’s a millionaire playboy, probably very likely. )

In this rather boring sequel, amazing stretchy man Richards (Gruffudd, delivering his lines in a I-don’t-know-what-the-hell-I’m-doing stilted voice) is to be wed  to the Invisible Woman, Sue Storm (Jessica Alba, still looking weird as a blonde). Her brother, the Human Torch, Johnny Storm (Chris Evans, one of the few bright spots in the film), is busy trying to round up advertisements to stick on his Fantastic Four uniform, and The Thing (Michael Chiklis, just meh in his role) continues his romance with his blind girlfriend, Alicia Masters (Kerry Washington, completely overplaying the “Look! I’m blind!” bit and starring off into space every shot). 

When a Silver Surfer entity shows up to wreak havoc on the Earth, the army rounds up the Fantastic Four to chase it down.  This brings the interest of Dr. Doom (Julian McMahon), who tries to get to the Surfer as well. Doom is probably one of the movie’s biggest wastes – he’s barely in it, the character is superfluous to the plot, and McMahon’s hamming is less fun this time around.  For all the sleepwalking performances, the biggest problem is that almost every scene in the film is unintentional camp.

The only stuff that works mostly involved the Silver Surfer, which has to do with Doug Jones’ (Hellboy) strange movements as the body actor and Lauernce Fishburne’s (Morpheus himself from The Matrix) authoritative baritone as the voice.  This has less to do with the skills of Tim Story’s adaptation, and moreso to do with Silver Surfer’s backstory and motivations.  As far as origins and characters go, its one of the more interesting sources. However, his motivations and actions in the 3rd act are pretty much freakin’ arbitrary and unexplained. 

Silver Surfer is the herald of Galactus, the planet eating destroyer of worlds and general all-around jerkface. You don’t actually see Galactus in this film.  No, apparently the producers decided in a film where a guy can stretch his body to fantastic proportions, and a yellow rock monster with a heart of gold is a major character, showing a giant dude in a purple headgear who eats planets would be deemed “too silly”.  They didn’t even go for the otherworldly space alien design of the “Ultimate” comic story (more on that later).  Instead, in Fantastic Four, we get a black stormcloud.  And some lightning and fire.  Terrifying.

The modern “Ultimate” comic book storyline of Galactus is more of a horror story about a big alien from outer space coming to kill the hell out of an entire planet; things are portrayed much differently than the original 1960’s comic storyline. The movie’s version is a mish-mash of the original storyline and the “Ultimate” version, so the end result is a wildly veering tone from apocalyptic menace (see the opening of the film), and total camp (see when Dr. Doom takes the Surfer’s board for a spin).

A mention about the musical score by John Ottman: way overblown. It works at the beginning when you see a planet being torn apart, but it wears thin quickly.  Ottman does have some good musical scores under his belt (The Usual Suspects), but in this camp-tacular version of Fantastic Four, Ottman’s John Williams-ish frantic trilling begins to annoy. It has not a hint of subtlety, just like the entire film.

The Fantastic Four never were all that A-list to begin with in the Marvel comics – they’re mostly around for whenever Spider-Man needs some scientific help.  A great Fantastic Four story can be done, but focusing less on bitchy infighting, lame gags, and more on a cool sci-fi idea would make it work.  But this not so Fantastic franchise seems hellbent on keeping things dumb.  And not even dumb and fun.  That I can get behind. Rise of the Silver Surfer is just dumb and lame.