Metacritic reviews

As summer franchise superhero flicks go, it's tolerable.

When will the people who adapt comic books into films realize that less can be so much more?

At a time when tortured superheroes like Spider-Man, Superman and Batman would benefit from some serious psychotherapy, it's almost refreshing to see a comicbook caper as blithe, weightless and cheerfully dumb as Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.

The script, credited to "Twin Peaks" co-creator Mark Frost and longtime "Simpsons" writer Don Payne, unsuccessfully strives for hipster irreverence.

It is passable comic book stuff, dumb and loud. Loud. LOUD.

An improvement of sorts over the lifeless 2005 edition.

Diverting, at times even visually impressive, but has neither the spirit or style of "Spider-Man" nor the ambition of "X-Men."

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.

The perfect summer movie, that is if you're eight years old or under. For the rest of us, the sequel to the first "Fantastic Four" that miraculously amassed more than $150 million in 2005, is a plotless, brainless, witless bore.

Surely the dullest of Hollywood's many comic-book-derived summer movies, "Silver Surfer" is drearier than corn dying in the Iowa sun, slower than molasses in Antarctica.