TheRetroCritic

After sitting through the controversial new Fantastic Four film   and revisiting Marvel's 2005 attempt at bringing Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's beloved, (and ever-so slightly) wacky superheroes to life cinematically, I thought I'd finally look back at the sequel, a film I did not care for upon its release and did not watch after that. Until now. Is it as bad as a remember it? Luckily no. Much like the first Fantastic Four movie, I had more fun with this effort than I expected. The cast (except, of course, Jessica Alba) once again does a pretty decent job, Chris Evans particularly, and the addition of iconic character The Silver Surfer was an inspired choice. A mixture of (now dated) CGI and practical effects (with good old Doug Jones once again buried head to toe in make-up) plus Laurence Fishburne's booming voice, the Surfer is such an interesting character he almost fully overshadows the Fantastic Four here, making us wish we were watching his movie instead of

Thinking about it, 2005 was a pivotal year for comic book movies. The first Fantastic Four movie was released after the first wave of modern superhero films reached its peak with the likes of superior sequels Spider-Man 2 and X-Men 2 , the same year that the gritty Batman Begins came out to reclaim the Dark Knight's validity and just before further dire sequels pretty much killed those franchises until Iron Man several years later. It should have been no surprise, then, that the film was both very much a product of that first wave in spirit and yet also the start of the subgenre's decline quality-wise. The Fantastic Four were always a lighter, more colourful bunch so making a live-action version of the comics would require some pretty high-end special effects to pull off the characters' unusual abilities and a script sharp enough to not let the film devolve into farce. With no Roger Corman in charge this time and an audience who accepted Spider-Man as a legitimat

Turn a corner in Sin City ... Wait about 10 years... Then turn another. Too little too late? The box-office seems to think so. But what of the film itself? Was Robert Rodriguez's sequel to his own Sin City , arguably one of the best comic book movie adaptations of all time, worth the long wait? This time, the film is mostly based on the Sin City stories "A Dame To Kill For" and "Just Another Saturday Night", though the latter is used more as an amusing prologue than anything else. The other two stories were put together by Frank Miller for the film specifically. One of them involves Joseph Gordon Levitt's gambler and the other continues Nancy's (Jessica Alba) story from the first movie. The problem with making a sequel this late is that you'll only be able to gather about a third of the cast from the original at best. And with the sad losses of Brittany Murphy and Michael Clarke Duncan a few years ago, this was never going to be easy. Es