Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer Reviews
Top CriticAn off-brand superhero movie, the cinematic equivalent of one of those generic breakfast cereals with a badly drawn squirrel for a mascot.
The performances are plywooden, the cornball visual gags are groanworthy, and Tim Story still can't direct his way out a sack with a map.
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| Original Score: 1/6
It's funnier and splashier than the original, but I still can't quite recommend it.
The first movie's genesis story was more fun than the perfunctory doomsday scheme trotted out here.
If you swept the cosmic dust of the superhero boom into a flimsy dustpan, you'd have the Fantastic Four franchise.
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| Original Score: C-
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer is more ambitious than its predecessor. It's also more cluttered and less fleet: The light, pleasingly casual quality of the first picture has evolved into something forced and metallic.
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer is a vast and significant improvement -- if not quite "fantastic," then the next best thing: It does not suck.
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| Original Score: 3/4
For non comic book fans over the age of 13, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer is a tedious, incoherent bore. For comic book fans of any age, it is an atrocity.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
Compared with its predecessor, the new movie contains less silliness to offend purists. At the same time, there isn't much to thrill anyone, either.
Rise of the Silver Surfer is an existentially and aesthetically unnecessary sequel to the equally irrelevant if depressingly successful Fantastic Four.
| Original Score: 1.5/5
Director Tim Story does the same sort of efficient, impersonal job he did on the first movie, keeping things at such a basic, almost childish level that it seems the movie is aimed squarely, if not exclusively, at the 12-and-under set.
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| Original Score: 2/4
In Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, our heroes get what they deserve: a decent action flick with a jolt of visual wow.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Unlike the recent spate of blackened threequels, those bottom-of-the-bag Spideys and Shreks and Pirates and Oceans, this kernel does pop.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Yes, the too-hot Alba is still miscast, and the film suffers from clumsy moments. But when it soars, it soars, and it is both blessedly brief and bloodless.
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| Original Score: B
You don't walk out of Rise of the Silver Surfer feeling as if you've gone three rounds with the Thing. This is a case where getting less than you bargained for feels like a victory.
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| Original Score: 3/4
At times silly and then serious, this Fantastic Four is the cinematic equivalent of multiple personality disorder.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
The Marvel comic book this movie is based on was never as sitcom-ish as the two films it's inspired.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Maybe it has something to do with seriously diminished expectations, but Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer is an improvement of sorts over the lifeless 2005 edition.
The film fails to sustain its modest running time of 87 minutes.
Once you accept that Fantastic Four is not trying to be anything deeper than popcorn fare, the ride can be fun -- with an ending more satisfying than Spider-Man 3.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Earnest, gee-whiz and foursquare, this simple and intentionally inoffensive sequel gets points for being easy to take and scrupulously avoiding obvious sources of irritation.
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| Original Score: 3/5
As summer franchise superhero flicks go, it's tolerable.
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| Original Score: B-
Sentient humans should stay away; all others may enter confident that their IQs are already in the Chernobyl-fried range and will not be affected, except for downward.
Although FF:ROTSS comes from the same place as Spider-Man (New York, and Marvel editor Stan Lee's noggin), this sequel to the 2005 Fantastic Four debut is lackluster, even by comparison to the lackluster Spider-Man 3.
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| Original Score: 2/4
The target audience appears to be Cartoon Network fans. Anyone outside that category is likely to find Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer a dull slog no avalanche of razzle-dazzle digital hooey can camouflage.
| Original Score: 1/4
Faithfully mining one of the Marvel franchise's more intriguing mythologies, the sequel proves every bit as disposable as its predecessor, with even less character definition and several tons more poundage in the f/x department.
Rise of the Silver Surfer doesn't aspire to much. It just happens to have the three things it needs -- velocity, artistry and a pretty good story.
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| Original Score: 3/4
It's not egregiously awful like the first film. Just plain awful in that formula way that kills your spirit and all hope for summer movies.
| Original Score: 1/4
Of all the Marvel-spawned screen franchises, the Fantastic Four is the most puerile, reducing as it does this smartly quirky comic book quartet to a fourth-grade primer in dysfunctional family psychology.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
These B-list demigods are so proudly, intergalactically mediocre that both the 2005 original and the follow-up tend to disable my super-snark beam.
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| Original Score: 2/4
It is passable comic book stuff, dumb and loud. Loud. LOUD.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Silver Surfer is watchable. But make no mistake. It's for younger filmgoers.
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| Original Score: B-
Beyond a few good special-effects sequences - notably the Human Torch chasing the Silver Surfer between skyscrapers, the movie is uniformly vanilla. When the heroes aren't polishing their super-skills, they sit around and complain about their lot in life.
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| Original Score: 2/5
Amid all the vapid dialogue and visual fireworks, the performances seem like afterthoughts, particularly those of Gruffudd and Alba.
It takes a while to get going, but once it does, it clips along, entertains, and doesn't overstay its welcome.
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| Original Score: 3/5
