Spider-Man 3
Sam Raimi, USA, 2007
Rating: 2.8

There’s a Saturday Night Live sketch from several years back that kept popping into my head during Spider-Man 3. It’s one of those Inside the Actors Studio bits with Well Ferrell, and to hammer home the impression of host James Lipton as a bombastic toady, guest host Tobey Maguire plays Dustin Diamond – that’s right, Screech from Saved by the Bell – as a developmentally arrested man-child whom Lipton, of course, treats like royalty.

Whether intentionally or not, Maguire pretty much recycles that performance for Spider-Man 3. The actor did a pretty decent job of conveying Peter Parker’s nerdy likeability in the first movie, but here he portrays Parker as a kind of cinematic descendent of Forrest Gump and Lennie from Of Mice and Men. His doughy features arranged into a constant mask of childlike wonder, he spends the first third or so of the movie walking around in a cloud of dopey obliviousness.

Snug and warm in his cocoon of naïvete, giddily delighted with how much New York City has embraced Spider-Man as a hero, poor Peter is blankly unaware of the growing discontent of his girlfriend Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst). MJ’s not doing so well – critical opening-night reviews have gotten her booted from the Broadway musical in which she was starring, and she spends most of the movie projecting an air of baffled disappointment, like the cheerleader who’s not getting any invites to the prom.

This brings out Dunst’s brittle beauty, which is both transfixing and distracting, as it only serves us to remind us that her Mary Jane is so far out of this nebbish’s league as to defy belief. It’s one thing to suspend our disbelief in order to buy into the film’s special effects and pseudo-science, but this flatly implausible relationship stretches that suspension far beyond the breaking point. Oddly enough, so does the reason she ends up dumping him, which has less to do with his idiocy than with the evil machinations of Peter’s brooding ex-best-bud Harry Osborn (James Franco).

By comparison, rolling with the movie’s superhero action is a relative breeze. But there sure are a lot of opponents to keep up with. First up is Flint Marko (played with a hint of genuine wounded humanity by Thomas Hayden Church), an escaped con who stumbles into some kind of particle-acceleration experiment (they’ve got to stop conducting these things outdoors, and so close to the local prison). In a beautifully rendered masterpiece of CGI wizardry, this turns him into the Sandman, whose granular powers no doubt helped drive the film’s budget into the stratosphere. What does this have to with anything? Glad you asked – turns out it was Marko who killed Peter’s beloved Uncle Ben, and not the schmuck he hunted down in the first movie.

But wait! There’s more! Dierector Sam Raimi ups the villain count with oily Eddie Brock (Topher Grace), played here not as a hulking reporter, as in the original comics, but as Parker’s figurative mirror-image, an opportunistic photographer who blames Peter for his fall from grace. And, of course, there’s Harry, who suffers a bump on the head and briefly forgets that he’s sworn revenge on Peter for the death of his father. That sure is a lot of villains to keep track of, but at least they’re more visually interesting than Willem Dafoe’s goofy Green Goblin and Alfred Molina’s underused Doctor Octopus.

And if that weren’t enough, there’s the evil space symbiote – the gooey, tentacle-y parasite that comes to Earth on a meteor that conveniently crash-lands in Central Park right where Peter’s making out with Mary Jane in a giant web (uh – is that a turn-on?).

Once Peter’s sufficiently torn up about Mary Jane dumping him and Marko being on the loose, the alien organism bonds with our hapless hero, somehow turning his suit black and amplifying his worst characteristics. Thus is born a kind of Mirror Universe Spidey, who gets an emo haircut, swaggers down the street like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, flirting with passing hotties like an out-of-touch, middle-aged divorced guy (those smiles the girls shoot back have to be incredulous giggles).

If this were almost any other movie, this is the part of the review where I’d say that the message we’re supposed to take from Peter’s transformation has something to do with battling one’s darker impulses, and that he eventually sees the light and rids himself of the black suit. But the symbiote doesn’t compound his cluelessness so much as amplify it: He goes from a smiling, deluded man-child to a man-child with a chip on his shoulder. The extent of his “dark phase” involves taking Gwen Stacey (Bryce Dallas Howard, in a thankless cipher of a role) to the jazz nightclub where Mary Jane works. (I think it’s safe to say that if you start out trying to rub salt in your ex’s wounds and end up twirling around in a snazzy production number, it’s time to consider a career in musical theater – your bad-boy days are numbered.)

Spidey does end up divesting himself of the symbiote, of course, but that only raises a more vexing problem: It immediately bonds itself to Brock, who then becomes the supervillainous Venom – who, for some unexplained reason, immediately gets all of Spider-Man’s abilities! (Presumably the symbiote absorbed them, but then wouldn’t Peter no longer have them? Ah, never mind.) 

Ultimately, everything comes to a head, with Venom enlisting the poor, misunderstood Sandman (he only wants to get medicine for his little girl!) in a battle that puts Mary Jane in danger (gee, didn’t see that coming) and sets up a climatic four-way, final-battle blowout. By then, audiences are apt to feel a bit like Spider-Man himself: Overwhelmed by a tangle of plot threads and dizzy from the rush of visually engaging set pieces.

To be sure, Spider-Man 3 is often spectacular to behold, thanks to top-notch special effects and some briskly paced fight scenes (Peter and Harry’s aerial battle through the alleys and skyscrapers of Manhattan is a doozy). But in its zeal to create an even bigger, better and faster summer blockbuster, it piles on too many conflicts, characters and action sequences. In the process, it loses its grasp on what matters most – the humanity at the heart of one of popular culture’s most resonant and relatable icons.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 4th, 2007 at 5:11 pm and is filed under Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.