The second big-screen adventure of Marvel's Fabulous Four might not offer much in the way of involving drama but - unlike certain other summer blockbusters - at least it doesn't overstay its welcome.

In a compact hour and a half, the mission is accomplished, and the world saved from the Silver Surfer, an intergalactic herald come to Earth to prepare it to be swallowed up by a huge and greedy planet.

With his cosmic-powered board, he can absorb and manipulate the universe's ambient cosmic energies.

But he has a conscience as well as a Zen-like detachment, which is lucky for a Fab Four who might otherwise have failed to save the situation.

They are, in Tim Story's film, at any rate, a fairly anodyne lot, given to speaking in clichés and, when not using their exceptional powers, are presented as rather ordinary denizens of America.

Their leader is bodystretcher Mister Fantastic (Ioan Gruffudd again), whose attempts to get married to the Invisible Woman, Sue Storm (Jessica Alba), are rudely interrupted by news of the Silver Surfer's arrival.

Whereupon the two, aided by Chris Evans as the Human Torch and Michael Chiklis, the most endearing of the quartet, as the freakish Ben Grimm, set to work amid a plethora of special effects.

These are nothing to write home about, but just about suffice.

What doesn't suffice is a dull screenplay and a storyline that goes dead about halfway through.

Fortunately, things pick up when Julian McMahon's Dr Doom sets up a spectacular finale.

In in all, it's a variable effort that adds nothing much to the franchise while giving its fans roughly what they expect: fun and games, in fact, from a comic-book series that never carried the weight of imagination of Marvel's best work yet managed to be popular all the same.