PG, 95mins

At last! A comic-book block-buster that doesn’t feel the need to justify its own existence with ponderous philosophical subtext and bloated running times. Instead, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer is everything you’d expect from a movie that began in the pages of a 1960s comic book – garish, giddy, emotionally simplistic, boldly idiotic and mercifully short.

Unlike, say, X-Men or Spider-Man, which purport to address Big Ideas of, respectively, race and moral responsibility, Fantastic Four concerns itself exclusively with our naff Lycra-clad heroes’ ramshackle pursuit of the titular surfer, an all-chrome intergalactic hitman who works for an enormous planet-chewing cosmic cloud called Galactus.

Along the way the arch-villain Victor Von Doom (Julian McMahon) – last seen racked, stacked and frozen in episode one – is reawakened with devastating results, while the Four’s elasticated leader Mr Fantastic (Ioan Gruffudd) must somehow find time to marry his, literally, transparent girlfriend Sue Storm (Jessica Alba).

BACKGROUND

• Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer

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BACKGROUND

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Of course, it’s all hugely infantile and worthy of its soft and cartoonish PG rating. Yet the movie, gleefully directed by Tim Story, makes no attempt to hide its own narrative deficiencies, which is ultimately part of its naive charm – it’s like an X-Men movie shot by Florrie Fimble. Thus characters here travel the globe with hysterical ease, nipping, unaided by superpowers, from Germany to New York in an afternoon, and from Afghanistan to the US in a morning. The superpower laws themselves are extremely malleable – ie, Mr Fantastic’s clothes magically stretch with his limbs, while those belonging to the Thing (Michael Chiklis) do not. Elsewhere Johnny Storm (Chris Evans) undergoes a traumatic full-bodied metamorphosis – from his very DNA to his bones, limbs and skin, and back again – within a minute, but without so much as an uncomfortable shiver.

The actors do their best with technobabble dialogue about electromagnetic pulses, satellite feeds and inverted molecular structures. But mostly, bar a few sentimental exchanges between a permanently gurning Gruffudd and Alba, they’re content to be simplistic ciphers in a playground battlefield.

Finally, there is perhaps a soupçon of subtext here, if you really strain for it, with the Surfer becoming a global-scale suicide bomber who is inspired by an unforgiving extremist ideology in the face of an implacable American military machine. And certainly, when the Surfer is captured and taken to Siberia for a brutal American-led inquisition, the words “extraordinary rendition” come to mind. But, still, it’s quite a stretch.

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