Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer

Well. Let me start out by saying I actually enjoyed the first film in this franchise. Sure, it was rife with continuity issues and campy dialogue, and sure there were a lot of things I would have done differently, but I left the theater with a kind of childhood glee that I only used to get when reading The Fantastic Four as an eight-year old child.

Now, for this, the second installment, I walked in with a slight feeling of dread. I’d been avoiding seeing it right away because I just wasn’t too sure about it, but I had no idea what I was in store for. Just like when you see a crappy band for the first time and you know ten notes into their first song that it’s going to only get worse, I literally leaned over to my friends and noted how much this movie was going to suck within the first minute.

It was like one of the producer’s bought one of those shitty joke and pun books from the bookstore, gave it to their ten-year old and told them to pick out the ones they thought were funny, then chose all of the rest and gave it to some "writers" to loosely coil a plot around what should have been called "Fantastic Four: The Rise of Laurel and Hardy" (and then subsequently panned for sullying the names of Laurel and Hardy).

I kept waiting for the "Boing" and "Zowww" sound effects as the characters tripped and stumbled over each other.

But I think the prize has to go to Jessica Alba, who really "acts" her heart out for the entirety of this catastrophe. I don’t think anyone let her in on the joke, and while Chris Evans does exactly what Chris Evans does best, Jessica Alba was going for the grammy. I wanted to pat her on the back, give her a cookie and tell her "it’s all right, nobody really expects all that much from you anyway".

You top all of this off with The Silver Surfer and his overly cryptic lines (imagine "your planet is already doomed" in a Laurence Fishburne-y voice (mostly because it’s Laurence Fishburne doing the voice)). They barely describe what he’s doing before not even bothering to describe how he stops what’s happening from happening (after barely describing why he has a change of heart in the first place).

The whole movie falls apart with a clichéd ending in which our heroes don’t have enough time to finish the wedding of Reed and Sue properly, but they do have enough time to make a fancy four out of smoke from their fantasticar in the air above the ceremony as they cruise off to save the world yet again.

What a fucking waste.