Tags: Comics   Movies   Reviews


The more superhero movies, the better, I say. It’s great to have so many movies being made in my favorite genres, and I want to support them. But sometimes it seems that movie studios are just taking geeks for a ride by putting hot actors into superhero costumes and filling 90 minutes of our time.

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer was quite a ride, and I’ll borrow a tag line from the movie to summarize my review: It’s clobbering time.

I’ll have to admit that this was better than the first movie. It had more interesting special effects, slightly better acting, and a story with more depth, but it was often painful to watch. The movie attempts to be campy, but induces groans instead of laughs.

The jokes are not funny. Not on paper, and certainly not in spoken dialog. The movie is full of unoriginal jokes that we’ve all heard before. For example, The Thing encounters a bear in a forest, and the best line the writers could give him was, “Overgrown fur ball.” Come on. Try a little harder than that! If you can’t think of dialog for a scene, then cut it, or make it a deleted scene on the DVD.

One scene has the Invisible Woman trying to understand why the Silver Surfer says he has no choice but to destroy the Earth. Jessica Alba delivers the worst line of the movie with equally awful acting skill: “You’ve always got a choice!” The horror of this scene was so shocking that I turned my head away from the screen, groaned, and then said “Oh shut up!” a little too loudly. Alba’s performance throughout was embarrassing, but this scene was especially amateur. We can’t blame Alba alone for the horrible scene she had to work with. Shame goes to the writers and director, and maybe to the editor who could have deleted all trace of this scene to spare us the horror.

Ioan Gruffudd’s (Mr. Fantastic) performance was also weak. This was disappointing, since I know he can act. Time to watch some Horatio Hornblower again. The personality of Mr. Fantastic was muddled and inconsistent. He was supposed to be a nerd, a genius, and a leader, while delivering bad puns and lame jokes. Gruffudd did a passable job when he was allowed to play the leader, but failed as the dancing, elastic, comical nerd. Why does every character have to crack jokes and perform visual gags throughout the movie? I would like to see Mr. Fantastic played as the straight man in future iterations of this franchise, if it’s allowed to continue.

However, even when he wasn’t cracking jokes, he was given plenty of crappy lines. For example, he used the term “cross-reference” too many times, and it doesn’t seem like the writers even know what that term means. Mr. Fantastic’s scientific computers were flashy and showed nonsense. All of his science talk was laughable. No effort was made to do research.

The Thing’s performance is worse than Alba’s, in my opinion. I attribute this to the rubber suit and disgusting synthesized voice with which actor Michael Chiklis had to deliver his (bad) lines. He looks like a cheddar cheese creature. That suit looks nothing like stone. Who looked at that suit and said, “Yes, that is what The Thing looks like.” Idiots. It looks like a big, delicious cheese man.

Chris Evans (Human Torch) gave the only good performance of the movie. His character was well-defined and he played it well. He could actually deliver the bad lines without inducing a groan or even a flinch. That’s a skill that is much needed in geek genre movies, like fantasy, sci-fi, and superhero. If you can’t deliver awkward, campy lines, then you shouldn’t be in geek movies.

The Silver Surfer was well done, and grabbed my interest enough so that I look forward to the Silver Surfer movie which is being written by J. Michael Straczynski, the mastermind behind Babylon 5. With a good script and a decent superhero, we might have a good movie on our hands. The Surfer was the only guy in the movie who wasn’t delivering bad jokes, so that’s probably why I liked him. Let’s hope that doesn’t change.

See Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer if you can stomach bad dialog delivered badly. The special effects are good enough to get you through this 90 minute film, but not good enough to forget that you’re being taken for a ride, and not the good kind.