Street Fighter: Film Series Retrospective

Well, seeing how I’ve done not one but two major retrospectives on the film adaptations of the hit video game series Mortal Kombat, it’s only fitting that I now give the same kind of attention to its longtime rival in the fighting game genre, Street Fighter. After all, 2026 has proven to be quite a big year for both franchises as they’ve both gotten new cinematic releases. Mortal Kombat saw its highly anticipated sequel, Mortal Kombat 2, come out to great success earlier this year, and now the time has come for a new take on Street Fighter with the series’ third live-action film adaptation. And so, to prepare for that, let’s delve into the other iconic fighting game franchise of the 90s, starting, of course, by going through everything that led to it becoming the pop cultural staple that it is, especially since it has quite an interesting history behind it. While most associate Street Fighter’s rise to fame with its second installment, the series technically started in 1987 with the release of Capcom’s arcade fighter Street Fighter, in which one or two players partake in a series of 3-round one-on-one fights. Player 1 would play as Ryu, a Japanese martial artist who seeks to become the greatest fighter of all time by traveling all over the world and fighting the best of the best, while Player 2 would play as Ken Masters, Ryu’s American rival and best friend. The original Street Fighter would end up being responsible for inspiring some major staples of the fighting game genre, such as special attacks that were performed by a series of button commands that weren’t directly advertised in the game itself, thus requiring players to learn them themselves through tons of practice, and a six-button control scheme that certainly must’ve been easier to control than the game’s ‘deluxe’ model’s control scheme that revolved around a pair of pressure-sensitive pneumatic pads that often caused many injuries.

But while it was ultimately a decent success from a sales perspective, this series didn’t truly come into its own until four years later in 1991. That, of course, was when Street Fighter II hit the market, effectively improving upon the controls of its predecessor, introducing another fighting game staple in combo attacks, and giving players more characters to choose from, thus launching the series’ eclectic collection of fighters (everyone from the patriotic Colonel Guile to the Russian wrestler Zangief) who all partake in a World Fighting Tournament held by the sinister warlord M. Bison. Whereas the first game did decently as far as arcade game sales are concerned, Street Fighter II was an undisputed juggernaut. With over 200,000 arcade cabinets and over 15 million units of its home console ports sold, it’s a title that has made over $10 billion across all its various releases, easily making it one of the best-selling video games of all time. It’s widely regarded as the series that effectively revolutionized the fighting game genre, thus paving the way for other popular fighting game franchises such as, of course, Mortal Kombat. But as for Street Fighter, it’s led to the series continuing on for many years, and not just with sequels (at the time of this post’s publication, its sixth mainline installment was released in 2023) but also through updated ports of practically every mainline entry that added in new gameplay features and more characters to the franchise’s expansive roster of playable fighters. And, of course, this has also led to some on-screen adaptations as well on both the big and small screen.

Now for today’s retrospective, we’re only going to be focusing on the three Street Fighter films that have gotten a theatrical release. In doing so, we will be skipping over a couple of direct-to-video projects; most notably, a pair of anime films based on the Street Fighter Alpha series, first launched in 1995 and set before the events of Street Fighter II. In 2000, there was an OVA, Street Fighter Alpha: The Animation, and in 2005, there was Street Fighter Alpha: Generations, both of which were primarily based on the Alpha series’ second video game installment, 1996’s Street Fighter Alpha 2. While I have reviewed Mortal Kombat’s direct-to-video releases, the Mortal Kombat Legends films, I usually don’t cover a franchise’s direct-to-video releases whenever I do one of these retrospectives, and so that’s the reason why we won’t be covering the Alpha films here today. We’re also not going to cover the various Street Fighter TV series and web series that have been released over the years, both from a live-action and animation standpoint. In the case of the former, there were a pair of web series developed by actor/stuntman Joey Ansah, 2014’s Street Fighter: Assassin’s Fist and 2016’s Street Fighter: Resurrection, both of which ran on the now-defunct media network Machinima. And then, for the latter, there were a pair of animated shows: Street Fighter II V, a 29-episode anime that premiered in 1995, and Street Fighter: The Animated Series, which ran for two seasons on the USA Network around the same time as Mortal Kombat’s animated spin-off, Defenders of the Realm. So, with all that info dumping out of the way, it’s time to select your favorite World Warrior and join us here at Rhode Island Movie Corner as we look at the film adaptations of the hit video game franchise Street Fighter.

STREET FIGHTER II: THE ANIMATED MOVIE (1994)

I’m sure some of you might have expected me to start today’s retrospective off with the live-action Street Fighter film from 1994… but the thing is, that wasn’t the only Street Fighter film that hit the scene that year. Whereas the live-action film was a December 1994 release, fans had been blessed with another cinematic release back in August of that year by way of an animated Street Fighter film, Street Fighter II Movie. Directed by Gisaburō Sugii, director of the 1985 film adaptation of the 1934 Kenji Miyazawa novel Night on the Galactic Railroad and the highly rated anime series Touch, the film was animated by Sugii’s production company Group TAC. When the film was released in North America, several edits were made to tone down some of the more mature aspects of the film to achieve a PG-13 rating, such as various instances of bloodshed and, perhaps most infamously, an extended shower sequence involving series lead Chun-Li with explicit on-screen nudity. But upon its home media release, both the PG-13 cut and an Unrated cut more in line with the original Japanese cut (albeit with the pop music-based American score rather than the Japanese’s synth-based score) were made available in the U.S., resulting in a rather unique situation regarding this film’s various cuts across different regions. The most recent Blu-Ray and 4K releases of the film come with the special feature of selecting any of the film’s regional cuts, including both the PG-13 and unrated US releases, an unrated UK release that sees some characters drop some F-bombs, and even an English cut that’s synced to the original Japanese soundtrack. We won’t be delving any further into the differences between these cuts, but I did want to at least note that, for the purposes of today’s retrospective, this review is based on the film’s unrated American cut with its American soundtrack.

The film follows the various characters from the world of Street Fighter II as they contend with the threat of M. Bison, the leader of the criminal organization Shadowlaw who has been hypnotizing many of the world’s greatest fighters in their plot for world domination, with their latest target being the elusive martial artist Ryu. The plot itself is, admittedly, the very definition of basic as it’s largely just a series of fight sequences that jump from character to character. But from an animation standpoint, Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie shines with its fantastic animation that delivers some spectacular fight sequences notably choreographed by renowned kickboxers Kazuyoshi Ishii and Andy Hug. From a character standpoint, the film perfectly translates the cast’s designs from the original Street Fighter II games to the screen while their expressive facial animations result in some of the film’s best comedic moments. As for the film’s voice cast, the American dub includes some notable names from the world of voice acting such as Steve Blum as the Native American warrior T. Hawk and Richard Epcar as Japanese sumo wrestler E. Honda. The biggest name, though, is easily Bryan Cranston as the Bruce Lee-esque action film star Fei Long; yes, before he was Walter White on Breaking Bad and even before he was Malcolm’s dad Hal on Malcolm in the Middle, Cranston’s acclaimed career primarily started through voice acting, which also included a stint as various characters during the first season of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. In short, Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie is an undeniable must-watch for Street Fighter fans. Sure, it can arguably be seen as a case of ‘style over substance’ in some places, but compared to the other films we’ll be looking at today, it’s also the most authentic of the bunch when it comes to superlatively conveying the over-the-top yet highly entertaining vibes of Street Fighter’s globe-trotting action-packed escapades.

Rating: 4/5

STREET FIGHTER (1994)

Now, we come to the one that I’m sure a lot of you were waiting for: the 1994 live-action film adaptation of Street Fighter directed by Steven E. de Souza in his first big-time directorial outing (not counting his ‘official’ directorial debut, 1973’s Arnold’s Wrecking Co.) after making a name for himself as a writer on iconic projects such as 1982’s 48 Hrs., 1985’s Commando, and 1988’s Die Hard. But despite that genre pedigree and the involvement of action superstar Jean-Claude Van Damme in the lead role of Col. Guile, this film endured a notoriously troubled production. We could be here all day going over everything that went wrong here (this Polygon article goes over every single detail of the story), but for the sake of brevity, I’ll do my best to focus on the most vital facts. For starters, Capcom pressured de Souza to include as many characters from Street Fighter II as possible; while de Souza initially managed to convince Capcom to limit it to just 7 characters, Capcom ultimately won out, forcing de Souza to include all but one (Fei Long) of the 16 characters from the game’s 1993 update Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers. As a result, de Souza struggled to incorporate these characters into a single story to the point where he often had to alter their characterizations from the games, such as having the mystical yoga fighter Dhalsim be a scientist forced to work for M. Bison or by merging Guile’s military friend Charlie Nash with the electrically charged mutant Blanka. He was even forced to create a film-exclusive character, Capt. Kenzo Sawada, to appease Capcom’s demands to include actor Kenya Sawada in the film. While Capcom originally wanted him to play Ryu, Sawada’s limited English vocabulary prevented that, hence why Bryon Mann was cast as Ryu instead and Sawada was given his own unique role, albeit still necessitating the need for him to be dubbed.

Once production began, de Souza and company immediately hit a roadblock due to the film’s other lead, Raúl Juliá, having recently undergone surgery after being diagnosed with stomach cancer (for the record, this was ultimately Juliá’s final film as he passed away before its release). To ensure that Juliá’s health would be where it needed to be for the shoot, the production schedule was drastically reworked to film anything that didn’t involve him first, thus resulting in frequent on-set conflicts between de Souza and the film’s stunt coordinator, Charlie Picerni, and often forcing the cast to learn their fight choreography on the fly. Add in the inadequate quality of the film’s interior sets in Thailand and the consistently egotistical behavior displayed by Jean-Claude Van Damme and you have what was, by all accounts, a miserable shoot. And then, once the film hit post-production, de Souza was then forced to heavily cut down on the film’s action sequences when the initial cut was given an R-rating by the MPAA which, in de Souza’s opinion, was the result of heightened media scrutiny in the wake of a recent school shooting in Wickliffe, Ohio (similar situations affected the likes of films like 1999’s Idle Hands and 2000’s Scream 3 in the wake of the even more infamous Columbine High School massacre in 1999). With Capcom insistent on a more marketable PG-13 rating, de Souza toned down the violence (often causing some major continuity issues while also preventing the use of the characters’ famous special moves because they didn’t have time for special effects) to the point where the film somehow landed the lowest rating of all, G, before a few additions of profanity ensured that PG-13 rating.

Upon its release, Street Fighter was a solid commercial success, making nearly $100 million worldwide on its $35 million budget. But from a critical standpoint, the film was downright savaged by both critics and fans of the Street Fighter franchise, thus becoming one of the prime early examples of mediocre film adaptations of popular video games. That said, though, in the years since its release, this film’s reputation has somewhat improved thanks to those who grew up with it and consider it a ‘guilty pleasure’… and having now seen it in full for the first time, I can certainly see where they’re coming from as this is a highly entertaining 90s popcorn flick. However, to be perfectly clear, that statement must come with a HUGE asterisk next to it because this is quite arguably a Street Fighter film ‘in name only’. Sure, it has nearly all the characters from the games, but the film takes them out of a storyline involving a global fighting tournament and puts them into a war film that radically alters some of their established characterizations from the games. There are a couple of the franchise’s trademark one-on-one fight sequences, but they’re largely reserved for the finale and, as noted earlier when we addressed this film’s various production issues, do show signs of having been cut down significantly to appease the MPAA. But when it comes to pure entertainment value, this film largely makes up for that with its rapid pace and its unabashedly goofy sense of humor.

Casting-wise, we should probably address the elephant in the room that is Jean-Claude Van Damme as Col. Guile. Instead of maintaining the character’s excessively stereotypical American persona from the games… the film has him played by the ‘Muscles from Brussels’ who doesn’t even remotely try to hide his Belgian accent that constantly leads to some unintentionally hilarious line readings that, by all accounts, he infamously never rehearsed before filming. Still, for what it’s worth, this version of Guile does provide some decently entertaining moments mainly thanks to the goofy yet distinct onscreen persona that legitimately made Van Damme a notable star of the action genre in the late 80s and early 90s. But, of course, as any fan of this film will tell you, the biggest star of the show is easily Raúl Juliá as the nefarious warlord M. Bison, a role that he took on knowing that it’d be his final film role as a tribute to his children, who were fans of the games. What comes out of this is one of the most gloriously over-the-top villain performances in cinematic history as Juliá happily revels in chewing the scenery every time he pops up, resulting in a pure gold mine of quotable lines (“OF COURSE!!!”). As for the rest of the cast, you have some other enjoyable standouts here and there, such as Miguel A. Núñez Jr. and Andrew Bryniarski providing many of the film’s best humorous moments as Bison’s henchmen Dee Jay and Zangief (“QUICK, CHANGE THE CHANNEL!” – Zangief).

In conclusion, one’s stance on the 1994 film adaptation of Street Fighter will undeniably vary depending on their history with its source material. For those who are mega-fans of the Street Fighter games, you’re more than likely going to be disappointed with this film as it barely tries to be in line with the games, both in terms of maintaining accurate portrayals of the franchise’s eclectic cast of characters and for ultimately being more of a war film with very few instances of the characters partaking in actual fight sequences. But if you’re like me and you’re more of a casual fan of the Street Fighter games (or even a complete newcomer to the series), then you’ll probably find this to be, if anything, a delightfully cheesy and all-around entertaining 90s blockbuster. I don’t like using the term ‘guilty pleasure’ in film discourse as I personally feel that one should never be ashamed of the films that they like, but in this case, I guess that you could apply that term to how I feel about this film. Street Fighter is by no means the best film that has ever been made that was based on a video game, but as far as this infamous subgenre is concerned, there have been FAR worse films compared to this one. This one, at the very least, benefits from being the exact type of fun and bombastic big-budget blockbuster that very much defined the film industry in the 80s and 90’s, which shouldn’t be that surprising given that it was directed by a filmmaker who played a major role in creating some of the most iconic blockbusters of that time. Sure, this may have also ended up being the only theatrically released film that Steven E. de Souza ever directed (the only project that he directed after this was a made-for-TV horror film, Possessed, that aired on the premium TV network Showtime in 2000), but if you’re willing not to judge this one too harshly as an adaptation of Street Fighter, then you’ll find yourself with a film that ultimately works the best as a casual crowd-pleaser.

Rating: 4/5 (I know that some of you might find that rating to be absurdly high for this film, but to be perfectly blunt, this is ultimately a case where I’m rating it based on its entertainment value rather than its overall quality)

STREET FIGHTER: THE LEGEND OF CHUN-LI (2009)

Despite the loss of Raúl Juliá, a follow-up to the 1994 live-action Street Fighter film was considered for a few years that would’ve reportedly added the likes of Dolph Lundgren to the cast. But by the mid 2000’s, the film rights shifted from Universal to 20^th Century Fox and a different Street Fighter film was ultimately put together: this one would not only reboot the franchise but be a prequel-type plot revolving around the series’ most prominent female protagonist, Chun-Li. Thus, we have Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, directed by Polish cinematographer turned director Andrzej Bartkowiak, whose cinematography work had him collaborating with the likes of Richard Donner, John Huston, and fellow European cinematographer turned director Jan de Bont. Bartkowiak also notably came onto this project with some genuine experience directing a video game-based film as he previously directed the 2005 adaptation of the hit first-person-shooter series Doom. But despite that film featuring the likes of Dwayne Johnson, Karl Urban, and Rosamund Pike in its cast and even a sequence that was a direct homage to its source material’s first-person aesthetic, Doom was yet another critical and commercial dud for one of cinema’s unluckiest genres… and as you might have guessed, the same exact fate ended up befalling The Legend of Chun-Li. It made less than $13 million at the box office on a $50 million budget and its Rotten Tomatoes score is in the low single digits, putting it down there with the various films that Uwe Boll has made as one of the genre’s worst-reviewed releases. In fact, one could say that this film was to Street Fighter what the infamous 1997 disaster Mortal Kombat: Annihilation was for the Mortal Kombat franchise.

Say what you will about the 1994 Street Fighter film, but at the very least, that one benefitted from being a studio-backed, decently budgeted action flick with a bunch of fun performances from its cast. The Legend of Chun-Li, on the other hand, is the exact antithesis of all that. Ironically, calling it Street Fighter’s Mortal Kombat: Annihilation is ultimately the most appropriate descriptor to use in this scenario as it too is a film that technically has a higher budget compared to its predecessor but is an all-around cheaper-looking production with poorly filmed fight sequences and laughable CGI that’s handled by a largely wooden cast. And whereas the 1994 film maintained a largely upbeat tone and swift pace, The Legend of Chun-Li is sluggishly paced and a bit too damn serious for its own good. This is especially the case if you’re watching its Unrated Cut that was released on home video where the ‘Unrated’ additions aren’t improvements to its editing or notable sequences that were taken out of the theatrical cut… but, instead, are awkwardly comped-in CGI blood splatters that feel out of place in a Street Fighter film. And yet, seeing how this film controversially reimagined M. Bison as a generic Irish businessman, is it any surprise that this is arguably even more of a ‘Street Fighter in name only’ film than the 1994 adaptation? Whereas the 1994 film could at least coast by on its success in being an enjoyably goofy 90’s popcorn flick, Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li is an all-around poorly conceived attempt at trying to revitalize Street Fighter’s cinematic output.

Rating: 0.5/5

Well, this little retrospective may’ve ended on a low note with the notoriously lousy Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, but fans of this iconic video game franchise have a new and exciting film adaptation to look forward to this month that will hopefully do its source material justice. Thanks for following along with us on today’s Street Fighter journey and be sure to sound off in the comments below to share your own personal experiences with this franchise.

YOU WIN!!! PERFECT!!!

Fantastic Four (1994, 2005, 2007) Film Series Retrospective

We are currently in the golden age of superhero films and Marvel is right at the forefront of this comic book revolution. Thanks to the Marvel Cinematic Universe along with films produced by other studios like Fox and Sony, many of Marvel’s iconic characters have graced the big-screen to solid success, from Iron Man to Spider-Man to the X-Men to even lesser-known characters like the Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man. But not every superhero has had a successful run on the big screen and probably the most infamous example of this has been the Fantastic Four. Despite being arguably one of the most famous superhero groups in not just the Marvel Universe but of all-time, their track record on film has been fairly mediocre at best, especially when compared with their fellow Marvel heroes like Spider-Man or the Avengers. The upcoming ‘Fantastic Four’ film, directed by Josh Trank, will be the third major attempt at bringing Marvel’s ‘First Family’ to the big-screen after two previous attempts in the past failed to attract much success. One film in particular didn’t even make it to theaters and the two that did are generally considered to be some of the weakest superhero films of their era. And today we’ll be looking at all three of those films. Yes I will be looking at not only the 2005 ‘Fantastic Four’ and its 2007 sequel but also the 1994 low-budget version that was ultimately never released in theaters. Here’s hoping that the new ‘Fantastic Four’ film will finally break this curse of this unlucky superhero film franchise.

THE FANTASTIC FOUR (1994)

Before the two ‘Fantastic Four’ films that we are all familiar with ever came out, and before Marvel was even the film powerhouse that it is today, there was actually a different ‘Fantastic Four’ film that even predates the 2005 film. This particular film was produced in 1994 by B-movie king Roger Corman and directed by music video director Oley Sassone. Never heard of it? Well, there’s actually a rather legitimate reason for this. For you see, this film never got a theatrical release, despite it being promoted in theaters at the time and the announcement of a planned world premiere at the Mall of America on January 19, 1994. Apparently the reasoning behind this move was that the film was never actually intended to be shown in theaters and was just produced so that producer Bernd Eichinger (who would go on to produce the following two officially released ‘Fantastic Four’ films) could retain the rights to the characters, though Eichinger himself denied these claims and instead claimed that Marvel stepped in because they didn’t want the film to ‘ruin the franchise’. Regardless of which story is true, most of the cast and crew were left completely unaware of this and in that regard, I do feel bad for them in this situation, having to ‘learn the hard way’ that the film they had all worked so hard on would never get to see the light of day. Unlike the 1990 ‘Captain America’ film, which was also never released in theaters but was released on home video, this film has never seen an official release outside of bootleg recordings on the internet.

To the credit of the cast and crew, if anything it looks like they at least tried their best with the limited resources that they had. This film only had a budget of around $2 million, and just about half of that budget went solely into developing the costuming for ‘The Thing’. But with that said, yes you could definitely tell that this is a very low-budget flick as far as superhero films are concerned based on certain elements of the production design and the visuals, or lack thereof in some cases. There’s seriously a ‘fight scene’ (and I use that term loosely) between the Thing and some of Dr. Doom’s henchmen which just consists of the camera rapidly spinning around to ‘simulate’ the action before cutting to the ‘aftermath’. And I’m pretty sure that the one major action sequence in which Johnny Storm is in full Human Torch mode recycles the exact same visual cues of an old ‘Superman’ cartoon from the 1940’s. Also there apparently wasn’t any major ADR work done for Dr. Doom because whenever he talks, he’s more unintelligible than Bane from ‘The Dark Knight Rises’. And finally, speaking of this iteration of Dr. Doom, he is easily the weakest villain in superhero film history as he lacks any sort of intimidation factor and repeatedly gets his plans foiled and his butt kicked by the Fantastic Four. Sure he may have a solid connection to the Fantastic Four being Reed Richards’ old friend from college, Victor Von Doom, but that doesn’t change the fact that he is just a wuss of a villain. Seriously, even Malekith from ‘Thor 2’ wasn’t as bad as him.

Ultimately, this ‘Fantastic Four’ is very cheesy and even a bit overly melodramatic at times, which partially stems from the film’s rather over-bearing score. But despite all of that, for some strange reason, I actually recommend you checking this film out at least once in your life (heck, I’ll even provide a link to it below). Let me be clear, it is by no means ‘good’ but similar to the legendary stinker ‘Batman and Robin’, it actually turns out to be one of those ‘so bad it’s hilarious’ films, namely due to the aforementioned ‘oddities’ that I mentioned earlier. And for what it’s worth, the four main leads in the film who play the Fantastic Four (technically 5 if you count the fact that Thing is played by two different actors); Alex Hyde-White, Rebecca Staab, Jay Underwood, and Michael Bailey Smith (Carl Ciarfalio plays ‘the Thing’) are fine enough in their respective roles. But ultimately I’d only recommend this film if you’re really interested in checking out an odd little part of cinematic superhero history; a low-budget superhero film that never got released to theaters and can only be viewed through bootleg-quality copies on the internet. Seriously, they released that godawful ‘Captain America’ film from the 90’s on Blu-Ray recently (I’ll get to that one someday) so why hasn’t this ‘Fantastic Four’ film gotten the same treatment? I’m serious, I think the time has come to give this film a proper home video release instead of just having it be viewable only on the internet and in rather piss-poor quality. In fact, dare I say that there is more heart to this ‘Fantastic Four’ film than the films that actually got released in theaters? That folks… is saying something.

Rating: 1.5/5

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHlBsLQ4BQs)

FANTASTIC FOUR (2005)

One whole decade after the 1994 ‘Fantastic Four’ film incident, producer Bernd Eichinger finally brought Marvel’s First Family to the big screen with 2005’s ‘Fantastic Four’, directed by Tim Story. The film was a solid hit at the box office, ultimately making about 3.3 times its original budget. However, the film itself fared poorly with critics and most audiences. As for me, I’ll admit that I don’t necessarily ‘hate’ this film compared to many others on the internet and while I hate using this term, I guess you can say this is sort of a ‘guilty pleasure’ for me. Still, this is definitely one of the weaker superhero films of the early 2000’s. It sort of shares a major similarity with the 2003 ‘Daredevil’ film in that it very much feels like a Hollywoodized superhero film in terms of execution, which seems to have been the major pattern for most of Fox’s Marvel flicks up until the X-Men series got itself back on track in 2011 with ‘X-Men: First Class’. In fact, for a superhero film, ‘Fantastic Four’ is actually rather light on superhero action. There are only about two to three major action sequences in the entire film and most of the run-time is instead focusing on scenes of the main characters talking and placing a lot of emphasis on humor that quite frankly comes off as being way too goofy. To anyone who complains about the Marvel Cinematic Universe films being way too focused on humor, trust me when I say that at least they’ve never gone ‘this far’.         

As far as casting is concerned, the film is about 50-50 in terms of its casting choices. The two biggest standouts are Chris Evans, before he took on another famous Marvel hero, Captain America, in, to be perfectly blunt, much better films, as the Human Torch and Michael Chiklis as Thing (also props to the filmmakers for sticking with practical make-up effects in order to bring Thing to life). Both do solid jobs in capturing their characters’ personalities and despite what I said earlier about the film’s over-reliance on humor, the back-and-forth camaraderie between them is actually one of the better aspects of the film. Heck, I’d also argue that Ioan Gruffudd was actually a solid choice for Mr. Fantastic even though he really could’ve benefitted more from a better script. But as for Jessica Alba as the Invisible Woman, this is definitely one of the biggest miscastings in superhero film history. In fact, this feels much more like stunt-casting given how much emphasis is placed on her sex appeal instead of any of the things that made the Invisible Woman such a great character in the comics. Julian McMahon is also majorly miscast as Dr. Doom. I may not have read much of the ‘Fantastic Four’ comics, but I definitely tell that the Doom of this film series shares little similarities with the Doom from the comics. All in all, though, I’ll admit that I still find this film to be fairly entertaining in parts and I don’t think that it’s the absolute worst superhero film of the era. But with that said, this is also by no means one of the genre’s best. Compared to other superhero films of the time like the first two ‘Spider-Man’ and ‘X-Men’ films, this is a much more ‘by-the-numbers’ superhero flick which definitely must have been majorly disappointing for fans of the franchise.

Rating: 3/5

FANTASTIC FOUR: RISE OF THE SILVER SURFER (2007)

So while the first ‘Fantastic Four’ film didn’t do so great with critics, it was successful enough to warrant a sequel in 2007 in ‘Rise of the Silver Surfer’. As the title suggests, this film, which surprisingly managed to warrant a PG rating after the first film was rated PG-13, introduces the iconic ‘Silver Surfer’, the herald of Galactus, the Devourer of Worlds. But like the previous film, this film also fared poorly with critics… but also like the previous film, I don’t think that this film is all that bad. In fact, I’d say it’s actually one of those rare sequels that actually manages to be better than the original, even if that’s not really saying much in the case of this franchise. It still carries quite a few of the same issues from the previous film, specifically the overly goofy attempts at humor and the hit or miss quality of the cast. Thankfully, though, this film does up the amount of action which was rather lacking in the first film. Because of that, this film also doesn’t drag as much at times like its predecessor did. And at the end of the day, the Silver Surfer (portrayed by Doug Jones but voiced by Laurence Fishburne) is definitely a major standout. But ultimately this film’s biggest downfall is how it portrays the character of Galactus. Instead of portraying him as the gigantic purple suit-wearing god-like character that comic book fans are all familiar with, he is instead turned into a giant cloud-like entity with a few fleeting visuals that resemble his look from the comics.

Now I’m not one to do many film comparisons but in the case of how Galactus is portrayed in this film, I feel that I must by comparing this infamous change to another infamous comic book film change; the ‘Mandarin’ fake-out from ‘Iron Man 3’. Obviously I’ve made it very clear in the past that I will always defend the ‘Mandarin’ twist because while it does go against how the character was portrayed in the comics, it actually worked well within the context of that film’s story. But the same cannot be said for Galactus in this film. There’s absolutely no reason story-wise for Galactus to look the way that he does in the film. Really, the only major reason I can figure as to why Galactus is portrayed like this is because the filmmakers couldn’t really come up with a way of having him look like he does in the comics without it being too silly. Though at the end of the day, I can’t really blame them that much for this because quite frankly even I can’t see how one can do this character justice on the big-screen without making some changes to his character design. So like with the first ‘Fantastic Four’, I’ll admit that I actually do like ‘Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer’. Again it is by no means the ‘best’ superhero film ever made. It makes one of the worst ‘character changes’ in superhero film history and it still carries some of its predecessor’s glaring issues. But at the same time I don’t think that it is ‘terrible’ and if I had to choose between this and the first film, ultimately I prefer this film as it does benefit from better pacing and more action.

Rating: 3.5/5