'Four' Adds Up to Zero

Hey, FTC! WAKE UP! Shouldn't some truth-in-advertising law require someone to rename "Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer" something like "Zzzzzzzz," or "Yawn," or what about "See Paint Dry!"? Isn't that your job?

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, as grim as February in Rockville. 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.

So many flaws, so little time. Hmmm, we could waste a few minutes on the total absence of chemistry between the dweebs and dweebette known as "The Fantastic Four," and if you still want to go with "Fantastic," maybe there's a lawsuit in your future. Or maybe we could try to discern whose eyes are deader: poor, dim, thick Jessica Alba as Invisible Woman, who looks as if she got a concussion on the field hockey meadow from some 300-pound, hormonally confused midfielder with a grudge, or Michael Chiklis, laboring under 700 pounds of rock disguise as The Thing (he looks like the landscape in "From the Earth to the Moon"). Or what about Actual Actor Ioan Gruffudd, hiding his Welsh gravitas behind a cheesy Yank accent as Mr. Fantastic, affecting the enthusiasms of a Real Smart Science Guy Who Turns to Rubber.

Then there's the schadenfreude dimension, by which the afflictions of the talented are always worth a chuckle or two, as in the rich misfortune of actor Andre Braugher and writer-producer Mark Frost, who once revivified TV with great work on "Homicide" and "Twin Peaks," respectively, and are now reduced to degradation on this piffle of a kerfuffle of a flopola of a trifle. Hollywood: so cruel, so ugly, so destructive. God, I love that filthy town!

But no: Let's go straight to the most important summer issue, the issue of design. As a concocter of fanciful machines, ominous labs, thrilling action sequences and potential ends of days, "Silver Surfer" isn't a dud; it's a Milk Dud, a blank, a misfire, a bang that went poof.

Visually, the movie is dead on arrival.

Here's an example: It turns out that Fantastic Four hotshot leader Reed Richards (Gruffudd) has built a secret vehicle by which to transport the four supermutants around the world to deal with various crises. We see it in his lab -- the lab looks like the lobby of a Club Med in the '70s and you could almost smell the disinfectant slathered on the floor! -- under a sheet, and when dork-o-mensch Chiklis reaches to pull the sheet off (or maybe it's mousse-lacquered, almost-irrelevant flameboy Johnny Storm, a.k.a. Human Torch, played by a haircut named Chris Evans), he's stopped. "No peeking, crust-face!" That's called a tease.

The movie plays this game: What is under the sheet? What, oh what, does this magical contrivance look like?

Oh, the movie makes us wait and wait and wait.

Could it look like a pumpkin? A bullet? A spaceship? A comet? A dog's nose? A woman's breast? A popsicle? A fish taco? John Wayne's left thumb?

No, it looks like . . . nothing.

It's just some cheesy piece of saucer thing with a batch of '30s-style open cockpits. It looks like a Porsche Boxster crossed with a CrisCraft and has the personality of a piece of Tupperware. It's utterly uninteresting. And with those open cockpits, how fast can it go? Seventy? Hey, maybe 100 miles per hour!