Jeepers. I went to go see Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer and left the theater feeling pretty good. My spirits were buoyed not by the fact that it was a great movie (it wasn't), but rather that it didn't waste nearly three hours of my day.

What a contrast from the slumped shoulder exit I made from Spider-Man 3, or Pirates 3. You know, that exhausted shuffle where you apologetically look at your date and say, "yeah, but the effects were pretty cool... right?" That tired straw-grasp where you try to salvage something positive from what ultimately proved to be a disappointment. That didn't happen this time. You can chalk up some of it to low expectations going in, but there's more to it than that.

FF doesn't aspire to be much more than what it is -- an unassuming family-friendly Sunday afternoon movie (albeit, it is dressed up as a Friday night blockbuster). Most of the flaws from the first one are still there -- Reed and Sue are still dull. Thing still looks like a turd. And Doom is criminally miscast and misused -- but -- and I can't stress this enough -- the movie doesn't waste your time.

It knows it's not a three-hour epic. It knows it's not an Important Movie. It knows you have better things to do, so instead, it does its darndest to entertain you in a very quick, economical fashion.

And that lack of bombast and gravitas is so refreshing -- especially considering one of the key points of the movie is that something is coming to gobble up the planet Earth. Explaining the concept alone would have eaten up half an hour in Pirates or Spidey. Nope. One quick dialogue exchange, and yep, the Earth is gonna get eaten. Keep the story moving.

That breeziness works well with the FF. It's true to the source material, where Reed and company would, oh, get transported to the moon or the negative zone, and then invent a device to get them back in the span of 22 brightly colored pages. This feels like a comic book from the colorful silver age, and not the angst-filled broody stuff that's become so standard.

The action set pieces work (especially the London one), and the Silver Surfer is an intriguing and well executed character. And the whole thing wraps up in about 90 minutes, so that when you leave the theater, you actually feel like you wouldn't mind seeing another one of those, instead of that usual feeling of gratefulness that the whole long, butt-numbing ride is over.

And yeah, the effects are pretty good too.


Other recent movies:


Pirates III: As you can tell, I don't have much praise for it. Too long and needlessly complicated. It got to the point where you simply stopped listening to the deal-making between characters, because you knew by the time a particular caper would come to an end, there'd be an oh-so-clever character who double-crossed the other or found some imaginative loophole. It got real old, real quick. Still, better than the second one, but miles away from the fun of the first.

Knocked Up: If you liked 40-Year Old Virgin, you should definitely see it -- especially with a great raucous crowd. Very funny, and very astute gender-based observations that aims beyond the usual "toilet seat up/down" level of complexity . And, Paul Rudd as usual is the unsung anchor to all this.

ph