It was... an improvement

Rating: 5/10 (10 October 2007)

Reed Richards, AKA: Mr. Fantastic (Gruffud) and Susan 'Sue' Storm, AKA: The Invisible Woman (Alba) are trying to get married, but every time the wedding day arrives, some end-of-the-world scenario gets in the way. Case in point: just as they're about to have their 4th attempt at a wedding, the Silver Surfer (body of Doug Jones, voice of Laurence Fishburne) touches down and designates Earth to be the next life sustaining meal for his grand master, Galactus. So it's up to Reed, Sue, Sue's younger brother Johnny, AKA: the Human Torch (Chris Evans) and their big orange buddy Ben Grimm, AKA: The Thing (Michael Chikilis) to save the day, complicated by Dr. Doom (Julian McMahon) returning and stealing the Silver Surfer's surf board.
Well, it's an improvement over the first film. "Rise of the Silver Surfer" has a slightly tighter focus and the action/drama/comedy blends together more smoothly than before, the sense of scale is better, the action sequences are spiffy - of particular note the sight of the fragmenting foursome struggling to save a collapsing ferris wheel is far more awe inspiring than Superman lifting the giant continent of Kryptonite in Bryan Singer's woe be gone 2006 turkey "Superman Returns" - and the Silver Surfer himself looks great. But Jessica Alba is still the weak link in the foursome; while Chikilis, Gruffud and Evans play their parts well enough, Alba's acting is simply not strong enough to be really convincing as the Invisible Woman. To be fair, Alba's not quite as annoying here as she was in the first film and manages to give the character a little more humanity, but still, she's just too much of a lightweight to really pull it off. And on top of that, the clearly Hispanic Alba (playing a white character) just looks silly with her hair bleached super blonde and sporting very fake looking blue contact lenses. And the continued use of Sue being caught with her clothes off in public fails to either amuse or even arouse, since Alba doesn't have the best body in the business, and even if she did, it would still be demeaning to the Invisible Woman, who was always a more classy, mature and wholesome comic book heroine, even if she did wear a skin tight blue suit. By having Sue repeatedly caught naked in public (or semi-naked), they're basically trying to force a sex appeal onto the character that was never really there to begin with, and I'm writing that as someone who usually enjoys seeing a good looking woman put on display. I'm writing this because I liked the Invisible Woman in the comics, she's easily one of the greatest female superheroes of all time, and to see her presented so poorly in the films is very disappointing.
And as a friend of mine put it, Alba looks like she should be playing Evans' love interest instead of his OLDER sister (they were both born in 1981).
And Reed Richards' dancing at his bachelor party outing will no doubt draw comparisons to "evil Peter Parker" dancing in the street to funky James Brown music in "Spider-Man 3".
Dr. Doom's still not getting the best treatment either. Instead of a regal monarch, we're still dealing with a guy who's like a poor man's Lex Luthor in an iron suit. And turning Galactus into a giant cloud instead of showing him as the big god like creature that he is in the comics was just ridiculous.
Perhaps an inevitable Fantastic Four 3 will be the "charm"?