Overall Rating
 Awesome: 18.54%
Worth A Look: 18.05%
Average: 21.95%
Pretty Bad: 26.34%
Total Crap: 15.12%
9 reviews, 151 user ratings
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| Spider-Man 3 |
by Rob Gonsalves
"Not the best, but a good way to kick off the summer-movie season."
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Forgiveness takes a while, so it's fitting that 'Spider-Man 3' — whose theme is forgiveness — takes a while, too. Its title is accurate: it's like three 'Spider-Man' movies in one, overstuffed with characters and plotlines that make the point that, as dear old Aunt May says, revenge is a poison.Not content with that, director Sam Raimi gives us ... singing and dancing. Much of it is jazz standards, and a scene with dweeby Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) getting his hepcat on in a jazz club so baldly belongs in another movie that, in an odd way, it fits perfectly into this one. I enjoyed the idea of the opening-weekend throngs having to listen to jazz, of all things, when what they came to see was Spider-Man duking it out with Sandman, Venom, and the new incarnation of the Green Goblin. Spider-Man 3 combines musical comedy with comic-book tragedy, a highly unstable mix that shakes out as a weirdly intoxicating potion.
As ever, Peter has massive personal problems in addition to the weight of being Spider-Man. His relationship with aspiring actress Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst) remains poised on a knife-edge of insecurity (his) and jealousy (hers). His news-photographer gig at the Daily Bugle is endangered by a new hotshot named Eddie Brock (Topher Grace), whose model girlfriend Gwen Stacy (Bryce Dallas Howard) has a crush on Spider-Man. His former best friend Harry Osborn (James Franco) still thinks Peter killed Harry's father (Willem Dafoe's Green Goblin from the first movie), and has suited up in Dad's old duds to settle the score. Meanwhile, escaped convict Flint Marko (Thomas Haden Church) stumbles into a scientific experiment and becomes Sandman, a superhuman walking mass of sand, and a black symbiote from outer space attaches itself to Peter and eventually becomes a shiny new Spider-costume, which makes him cooler and more powerful but also more callous.
It's a Spider-Man tradition to humanize the supervillains, and Thomas Haden Church puts a sad Karloff step in his walk; his Flint Marko is driven to steal money to restore his daughter to health, and he has a way of looking sorrowful even when punching a dog. (Theresa Russell, the last actress I'd ever have expected to see in a comic-book blockbuster, plays Marko's ex-wife and, with only a few clichéd lines, makes Dunst and Howard look like callow ingenues.) Topher Grace's unethical Eddie Brock is less nuanced, and James Franco's Harry Osborn has done his Inigo Montoya bit once too often, but Sandman is a dynamic creation with and without CGI, and he's involved in the most spectacular brawls with Spidey. Sam Raimi may have spent a king's ransom on the movie, but he puts it on the screen — as in the superb Spider-Man 2, he recaptures and magnifies the thrill a kid feels when reading an action-packed comic book, specifically one from the '60s or '70s.
In a widely-hated section of the film, Peter bops down the street under the corruptive influence of the symbiote, hitting on all the ladies. Have the people who've heaped scorn on the movie's moments of levity forgotten Spider-Man's original wisecracking conception via his creator Stan Lee? (Lee has his obligatory cameo here, his most rib-nudging yet; he just about grins at the camera and brays "Hi, I'm Stan Lee.") I thought it was amusing that Peter's "dark side" manifested itself not as destructive id but as a dork's fantasy of wowing the babes; it's just another plate on this overly generous buffet table, and you can nibble from it or toss it in the trash.
If Spider-Man suffered a bit from rookie jitters (Raimi had never before been entrusted with a budget north of $100 million), and Spider-Man 2 was the ideal Spider-Man annual beautifully realized on film, Spider-Man 3 is Raimi's place to clean out his desk. He probably knows he's told enough Spidey tales, and, realizing he may never have such a huge audience again in his career, he decided to throw in everything he could in a what-the-hell spirit. Including jazz. The movie is cluttered and certainly not without flaw (some great gags, like J.K. Simmons' hilariously splenetic J. Jonah Jameson attempting to tone down his anger at his wife's behest, are forgotten about), but I followed and enjoyed its emotional throughline, where freakishly mutated men battle as much with their own souls and consciences as with each other.It's been a fine if bumpy ride with Raimi down this corridor of Marvel Comics history, even if I'd love to see him working on something cheap and scrappily funny again. Seeing old-school Raimi stalwarts as Bruce Campbell and Raimi's brother Ted in these megabudget flicks has been entertaining, but it tends to remind us of how Raimi started out, and the sad improbability that he can go back again.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=15898&reviewer=416
originally posted: 05/07/07 08:55:04
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USA
04-May-2007 (PG-13)
DVD: 30-Oct-2007
UK
N/A
Australia
03-May-2007
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