4 reviews

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Glenn Watson May 9, 2007

Spiderman 3 is a shocker. Quality action, edgy relationships and moral dilemmas marked the first two. Spidey 3 gives us bloated effects, crass plotting and buckets of emoting. The soaring strings aren't Spidey's webs but the orchestrations of an over-ripe score.

Extra-terrestrial black goo turns Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) to the dark side - from geek-boy to smarm-king. Meanwhile Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) needs a shoulder to cry on and it ain't Peter's.

A radiated thief becomes the Sandman. A vengeful friend gets a bump on the head and becomes mates again. Parker believes his own publicity and ignores his girlfriend. And rival photographer on the Daily Bugle (an excellent Topher Grace) provides a professional challenge both to Parker and to his Spidey alter ego.

Spiderman's an accidental hero - bitten by a bug. And every villain is also reluctant: the Green Goblin, Doc Ock and now the Sandman and the black-clad Venom. All were zapped, trapped or infected. It sets up an intriguing morality – which the first films explored. No one is really bad. But it saps the conflict and head-to-head action.

Ultimately Spidey 3 is a homily with video-game action and so-so effects. Wholesome to its core, it sees good in everyone, even the villains. Everyone needs saving from themselves. Only Mary Jane remains true to who she is. A film about forgiveness is a welcome antidote to revenge-happy action-flicks. But this one simply lacks a strong enough story to stop you shifting in your seat.

Dunst is as good as ever. And at least Tobey Maguire gets to be less wooden and blank-faced than usual. In the end, though, this Spider wriggles and tickles but has no bite.

What a strange mish-mash this film is. The title credits are incredible. There’s some unexplained establishing shot of a spiderously viscous black goo attaching itself to Peter Parker’s uber-nerdish motorcycle and then we are shown some Junior Goblin-on-Spidey action on the assumption that we all know what is happening anyway, and this inept or lazy attitude to story-telling is the film’s undoing. It’s as if Raimi can’t be bothered to solve the problems of his story structure. So, distortion of narrative time has the Sandman washed away somewhere at mid point to complete Peter’s vengeful quest for his uncle’s killer, only to have his narrative line re-introduced when much water has passed under other narrative bridges – but from the apparent same point-in-time when he disappeared. What’s Raimi saying here? ‘Look, everybody knows no villain dies till the final frames, you all knew he was coming back, so I can mess it up and do it whenever I want.’ What was with the jump-cut to the news-room and why was the news-caster just so bad? Why was the live broadcast female in the streets even worse? And why-oh-why was Harry’s ugly butler suddenly turned in to an impromptu ‘deus ex machina’: ‘I’ve seen things in this house I’ve never spoken of.’ Do people get paid to turn up to work to write dialogue like this? The ugly butler’s name is Bernard. Presumably to follow in sequence from Batman’s Alfred. Will Superman have a narrative-short-circuiting butler when he next returns? If so, his name better begin with a C.

Sure it’s enjoyable, the Sandman’s initial dissolving and his rise from the sand is a beautiful, terrible, and poignant sight, tho’ he’s a tad lumbering and just too big by the end, and there was no tension at all when Peter Parker forgives him. But the film’s just a whole load of material that could be cut and redistributed in so many ever longer, ever more teasing trailers; it’s not a finished work. James Franko puts in a nice turn as a man whose villainy is dependent on whether he can remember to be banged on the head that day or not. He is also a whole lot better at portraying a slightly sleazy coolness than Tobey Maguire – his attitude to cooking omelettes should get the girl every time. Maguire is saddled with a problem: how does he act out the hubris of a lovable geek? Wearing black, getting a junior Hitler comb-over, and proving hot on the dance floor aren’t really very evident signs of an uncontrollable rage. And why don’t men and women talk to each other in super hero movies? If the film is trying so hard to ground the problems of having super powers alongside being an ordinary person, how about some ordinary dialogue about ordinary emotions? As it is, Peter and Mary Jane have a Pinteresque relationship of pauses but without any Pinteresque subtext. Peter’s botched marriage proposal is a superb technical exercise in background comedy, but it should be that plus an engaging extension in what we know about how they relate.

One scene says it all about this film’s attitude to itself and us: Peter is too busy flirting with his landlord’s daughter to bother to listen to his esteemed lab prof’s analysis of whatever the venomous black goo is. Well if he can’t be bothered, why should we?

JCM 11 May 2007

This is a bad film. The plot is full of holes to the point of incoherence. A supervillain-to-be inadvertently stumbles into a `Particle Physics Test Facility' and then miraculously gets `cool powers'. A meteorite just happens to land next to MJ and Pete having a romantic cuddle in a giant web and sets of a chain of events that include tight black trousers and jazz dancing. Hot Harry gets a knock on the head that conveniently for the plot changes the MJ-Pete-Harry dymamic completely. The list goes on and fills 140 minutes. These things may have made sense in the comics, but in this film it just feels like there is too much going on. And it is boring. To add to the pain, the `emotional' scenes could not have been handled any worse. If you like seeing highly paid Americans trying very hard to make their lips tremble then you will enjoy this film. To add more pain, there is plenty of American patriotic garbage (for example, we are shown Spidey, all heroic, with a giant American flag in the background) and cheap French maitre d' `comedy'. I guess the first two hours of sap can be stomached because of some excellent FX-loaded fight and web slinging scenes in between, but after that, and with 20 minutes to go, I was aching to leave. Even if you love Spiderman and the first two movies I recommend avoiding this mess unless you are very high.

Max 7 May 2007

This is a very odd film. Spiderman 2 seemed to be very well regarded and to be a reasonably successful blend of amazing action and tortured self-analysis. Maybe that was the problem, in that the director didn’t want to make another film exactly the same. It might have been better if he had, as this film is like the previous one except that various elements have been added and distorted to the point where it almost seems like a deliberate parody.

Rather too much happens, as if we needed to be distracted from an underlying emptiness. Childhood friend Harry, aka Green Goblin Junior, goes from being a baddie to a goodie to a baddie to a goodie to dead. There are two other supernatural foes. One of them spends half the film in a malevolent symbiosis with Spiderman himself before finding a better host in Peter Parker’s journalistic rival, the other is a petty crook turned invincible sand monster who happened to kill Peter’s uncle, and as it turns out, only needs to be forgiven.

So far so weird? There’s more. The most fun parts of the film are the sequences where off-duty Peter, in his “black-suit” phase, comes over all sharp and gothic and confident and starts dancing at girls in the street, John Travolta style. It’s great, but never really integrated with the rest of the film. Ursula, the landlord’s geeky daughter, gets to ham it up in a number of scenes which are pleasantly silly, but really only distract from the plot. And the emphasis on comedy seeps into the rest of the film, such that this audience was laughing out loud at all the supposedly “emotional moments”.

A slapstick version of a Spiderman film, in the vein of the director’s splendid “Evil Dead 2”, could be made and would probably be rather fun. But this isn’t it. This film is like a strange halfway house between summer blockbuster and cult B-movie. The action is fantastic as ever, but the characters are cardboard. It’s as if a parasite from outer space had leaped on the film while it slept, and slunk tentacles into its brain but never quite achieved complete dominance.

Enjoyable, but for many of the wrong reasons.

Ian Threadgill 6 May 2007