The Writers of "My Little Pony" Present...Fantastic 4: Rise of The Silver Surfer

At my Giant (grocery store) there is a large red $1 movie kiosk. It's where I indulge my love of bad bad films. Unless, of course, I see them first on cable. This kiosk has given me so many gems -like Catch and Release, The Number 23, and Because I Said so - stinkers everyone. But I don't think any of these quite rose to the level of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (FFROTSS).

I knew this film would be bad, but I didn't realize it would be quite so spectacularly bad. The other films from the $1 kiosk played out more or less the way I expected, but in FFROTSS I was expecting the plot arc to be the brain child of a 15 year old boy - you know - fighting, explosions, and Jessica Alba tramping around in spandex. The first two I enjoy, the last one I can live with.

But alack! Alas! The film seems to have made some sort of attempt to appeal to 14 year old girls, and thereby become a pointless meandering disaster that makes Transformers seem like a Pinter play. What am I talking about? Primarily the fact that whole damn film centers around Jessica Alba's impending nuptials to (the very tasty) Ioan Gruffud. All she talks about in the whole film is:

*her wedding
*how she wants to have a normal wedding
*her future family with Mr. Fantastic
*how she wants them to have a normal family without having to go off and save the planet all the time.

Jesus, I'm a girl and I can't imagine spending that much thought on my own wedding, much less the wedding of a fictitious superhero. I mean, she can turn invisible and her fiance is made of plastic and the best the writers can do is 90 minutes stolen from the Wedding Planner? Bleah. There are only two wedding movies that exist in my universe: Four Weddings and a Funeral (although death to Andie MacDowell) and Muriel's Wedding. Since FFROTSS is none of these it should kindly take itself to the garage, turn on the car and have the decency to snuff itself out.

The wedding plotline is made worse by the fact that the screenwriters completely dispensed with the idea from the first film that Jessica Alba's character is some sort of scientist. There's no mention of science, she doesn't do anything sciencey, but at one point she accidentally loses her clothes - hillarious!

Ok, so it goes without saying that she's mere eye candy lacking in any sort of gravitas whatsoever, but still, this is supposed to be a movie about superheroes, not Betty Crocker circa 1954. To bring it all home, at one point Ioan Gruffud/Mr. Fantastic is having a pissing contest with general Andre Broughard and proclaims something asinine like "Well, I'm engaged to the hottest woman on the planet". Oh for shame, FFROTSS! I was embarassed for you.

And what of the silver surfer? Honestly, he's kind of peripheral to the wedding. He just some guy from another planet (a silverly planet perhaps?) who shows up to drill holes in the Earth with his surf board so it will explode and the evil entity stolen from The Fifth Element can eat it thereby totally ruining the wedding (oh and kind of ending all life on earth). The SS is voiced by Laurence Fishburn aka Morpheus who doesn't seem to be getting much work these days.

Everytime he would talk I'd just think: Jesus, I want the red pill, because if the Matrix involves this movie, I want out.


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