THE world is in dire need of a superhero . . . a caped-crusader with enough superpower to zap Hollywood where it hurts. The crime?

You could start with the way Hollywood holds the public to ransom with second-rate comic book plots. There was a time when Tinseltown scenarists wrote films about people: situations that revealed something about real life even if they were steeped in genre. Often, the stories came from books and plays and so tended to have extra layers of substance.

But then the moneymen discovered the ready-made cartoon world of comic books. So what layers of meaning do many of today's thin comic-book films give us?

Black and white, good versus evil, with about as much elbow room for shades of grey as there is in George Bush's Us versus Them foreign policy. And in this sequel to Tim Story's 2005 film, the same two-dimensional moral territory crops up as in the recent SpiderMan 3 . . . that we can choose between good and evil. And it is explicity spelled out. But the truth is more simple: there is no choice when you are beaten into submission.

The massive profitability of comic-based movies is fuelled by obsessive adult fans, powerful merchandising, the draw of 'bigger and better' special effects and the promising lucre of sequels. This year we've had the underwhelming Spider-Man 3, Zack Snyder's jingo-fascistic 300, the execrable Ghost Rider and TMNT. Later there's Transformers. With such an abundance of ready-made characters and stories primed for refitting, and excitable fanbases to exploit, a comic book avalanche is going to thunder down. And so continues the dumbing down of the moral universe.

This sequel has again four (super) humans at the core, but the main villain isn't real at all . . .

he's a CGI alien who rides a silver surfboard. It's an idea that, imaginably, was cool in 1966 when the comic was written; now it sits like a bizarre anachronism among the jumble of modern allusions the film's writers Don Payne and Mark Frost have put in.

Picking out references to environmental annihilation, US military hegemony, extraordinary rendition and celebrity, you find yourself asking the pertinent question: why would a translucent silver alien who is planning for earth to be consumed by a planetdestroying superalien, do so while riding a silver surfboard? Wouldn't it, like, totally bum your style? As if, dude!

Out to stop him, of course, is the Fantastic Four. There is Jessica Alba's Susan Storm. She can make things invisible, but most of the time fixes her concentration on arranging the perfect white wedding to Reed Richards (Ioan Gruffudd). But he's too busy being a genius scientist and limb-morphing superbeing. Then there's the flying fireball Johnny Storm (Chris Evans), a narcissist who thinks he can set the ladies alight, and Ben Grimm (Michael Chiklis) who looks like what can only be described as a lump of calcified brain matter that talks.

Complicating things is the thought-to-be-dead Dr Doom (Julian McMahon), an arch baddy who tries to do a deal with the Silver Surfer.

The plot takes in bickering, scientific-jargon hogwash, hyperspeed texting and some nominal character development . . . an average day then for the teenage moviegoer.

But the film has the kind of childish tone found in kids' TV that could alienate teens, not to mention jaded adults.

The bulk of the story is taken from select issues of the Fantastic Four, but I suspect the writers have seen The Incredibles too: all that struggling with celebrity status, while poor Susan frets about how she can raise a family as a superhero. And somebody has been raiding Roland Emmerich's threadbare The Day After Tomorrow for ideas on how to stage a global crisis.

So, not very original, but Tim Story tells his tale with reasonable efficiency. It's competent and entertaining, but not fantastic or terrible either: you could say it sits somewhere in a shade of grey.