The full Empire review will be up online as soon as possible, but with the release of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer only days away, we thought we'd bring you a first reaction in the meantime to keep you going:
When put alongside the big budget sequels we’ve already seen this year, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (which is, according to its title sequence, actually called merely ‘4: Rise of the Silver Surfer’, having apparently lost conviction in its own fantasticness) has one major advantage: it makes sense. It might be entirely lacking in ambition, originality and dialogue that doesn’t feebly punch the nose, but it’s content to get in, throw a few million dollars worth of effects around, wrap up a happy(ish) ending and get the hell out again.
There’s refreshingly little effort to ‘go darker’, possibly the most foreboding words that can be used to describe a franchise, now that it means making Spidey’s web impenetrably tangled and sucking all the fun out of Pirates. What we have here is a film that represents the term ‘comic book movie’ in its truest form. That’s comic book, not graphic novel. It has all the depth of a Sunday morning cartoon strip. It’s brightly coloured, faintly amusing, plotted on rails, brief and consistently 2-dimensional. But, since that seems to be everything it’s aiming for, it could be said that, on its own shallow level, it works.
One thing that sadly does not work is the Silver Surfer. It should be impossible to make Norrin Radd anything other than cool, but Tim Story has managed it with aplomb. Anything interesting that the Surfer has to do has already been revealed in the trailer. His further contribution to the film consists of intermittently drifting onto screen in expensive slo-mo, making big holes in the ground, saying something nonsensical and depressingly earnest to Sue Storm (Jessica Alba, to paraphrase Pauline Kael, running the gamut of emotions from A to…well, let’s try and nail A first, shall we?) and then titting off again. He doesn’t soar; he’s a big old drag.
As for Galactus: what you’ve heard about him being a giant cloud is only semi-true. There’s a brief suggestion of the big pointy hat, so he may simply be inside the swirling mass of planet-devouring stratus, embarrassed by his daft costume and ungainly size. Who can tell? The return of Victor Von Doom is pleasingly pantomimic. If you thought Julian McMahon couldn’t get any more camp than he was in the first film, boy, are you in for a surprise. The guy should be wearing rhinestones and twirling a handlebar moustache.
Story may have taken the sheen off his new guy and screwed up the villains, but he has managed to inject some more life into his lead quartet. Where the first movie seemed almost embarrassed by their powers, the sequel revels in the pointless, but nonetheless fun, things their screwed up atoms can do. Every possible way The Thing can squash something, Johnny burn something and Mr Fantastic contort his unpleasant limbs for comedic value is exhausted.
So this is better than the first woeful movie. It moves quicker, looks better and generally enjoys itself more. You’ll never forget you’re viewing a heavily researched studio product – multiple references to focus groups and endorsements are either incredibly sly or deeply shameless – but if you’ve seen the first installment then that’s what you’re coming back for and you’re getting a mildy new and improved version. It’s still bubblegum, but keeps its flavour a little longer.