Great Fun and a Great Relief

Rating: 8/10 (18 June 2007)

I thought "FF:Rise of the Silver Surfer" was great fun. I'm glad that Tim Story and crew managed to completely ignore the bad press the last film got and just forged ahead with their vision for # 2 (of course, they were helped by a $158 million take at the US Box Office for the last movie).
I've nothing against the Batman-Style angst-ridden superhero genre, but after they angst-ed up Superman, the most positive of heroes, I knew that the "dark superhero" thing had just become a cliché in its own right. Every freakin' superhero has to be miserable for some reason. Bloat is the other Superhero movie ailment. Even the feisty Spiderman franchise has finally caught the "Too Many Villains, Too Many Plots-itis" disease from Batman. So, depression and confusion rule most of today's superhero movies--except for FF.
The Fantastic Four have so far avoided both these traps. For the most part, the film shows having superpowers as being fun. In keeping with the original comic, the super-characters in the FF films do have problems like other folks-- but not deep, dark, brooding problems. And "Surfer's" plot, while typically comic book fantastic, is comparably straightforward and linear. AND, I might add, free of flab. No three hour epic here. Just a tightly composed entertainment that runs about 90 minutes--like an action movie should.
To sum up--I liked it a lot! And I predict another hit and another installment in the works!