F4: Rise of the Silver Surfer (Review)

After seeing the first Fantastic Four film, I remember telling people it was "fun". Not too serious, but certainly not silly throughout. It had some good moments and was definitely worth seeing despite a little "family-friendly" goofiness. Even that was forgivable, since the Fantastic Four is one of the few superhero teams rooted in a literal family.

The trailers for the sequel seemed to promise a darker film with higher stakes and incredible action. Don't get your hopes up.

I saw the film last week and was not at all impressed. This film clocked in at 89 minutes, and it's easy to see that all the stretching (no pun intended) was done at the beginning.There is very little action in the first 30 minutes of the film, the characters are as 1-dimensional as they were in the first film and the script was terrible. Sometimes the actors almost seemed to struggle through cheesy dialogue, desperately trying to make artistic choices that made sense in a senseless script.

I will say that the Silver Surfer looked incredible, and his action scenes were great. Too bad they needed to invent a plot device to cut back on the Silver Surfer's special effects. I won't spoil the details, but the Surfer doesn't look as cool as he should for way too much of the movie. I think if they didn't have the budget to keep him the way he's supposed to look through the whole film, they should have waited another 10 years to use the character.

Now, if you are the parent of elementary age kids that love action and superheroes, this will probably be a great film to take them to. YOU just won't get a lot out of it. And now that I think about it, I'd even recommend waiting to rent this one for your kids, since they'll want to skip past the first 30 minutes of time filler anyway.

Marvel has had a really good pattern of superhero movies. But if they're not careful they'll one day look back and remember this film (as DC remembers "Batman Forever") as the beginning of the end.

Rated PG for sequences of action violence, some mild language and innuendo.

Quality: 6.5/10

Relevance: 5.5/10