SPIDER-MAN 3 review: oh how the mighty have fallen

I was actually looking forward to finishing off the Spidey trilogy, especially coming off the back of the first sequel. I had fond memories of this third instalment, but watching the film again, I have no idea why. Maybe it stands on its own quite well — that is, if you don’t watch it within 48 hours of the other two — but after the awesome Spider-Man 2, Spider-Man 3 feels detached, unfamiliar, and wrong on several levels.

So after enduring difficult trials in the middle Spidey flick, Peter Parker now leads something of a charmed life. He’s got the girl, the city loves him, he’s getting steady work and good grades. But from the very beginning Spider-Man 3 feels completely different from the first two movies. The tone and pace have changed, as well as the narrative focus. There is way too much going on in this movie for it all to hit the right mark. But where exactly did Sam Raimi and the screenwriters go wrong?

Well, for a start, they make Peter Parker annoying. He’s always put his foot in the majority of social situations, but here he acts aggressively and pig-headedly, not like the level-headed, polite character of the original film, and manages to screw things up for himself with girlfriend MJ. For her part, Mary-Jane also becomes annoying, in a jealous-of-my-boyfriend’s-superpowers kind of way. This seems especially weird after the cathartic conclusion of Spidey 2, in which MJ proclaims her love for Peter in a powerful, honest way. Funny how people backflip whenever dramatic tension requires them to do so, huh? And then there’s Harry, who at the end of the last film had discovered Spider-Man’s true identity, and looked set to follow through on his promise to kill the Spider, even it meant killing his best friend as well. This awesome potential for drama is unceremoniously swept under the rug in an oddly unoriginal fight scene early in Spider-Man 3 — Harry attacks Peter and winds up getting beaten, and wakes up in hospital with convenient short-term memory loss. This is a pretty criminal use of plot device, especially at this point in the overall three-film narrative. At about this point, with all three major leads disappointing in a serious way, I began to greatly anticipate the introduction of a good villain to shake up Peter’s world.

So after briefly setting up Harry as supervillain New Goblin and then trashing his memory in some horribly amateur plot device, we get another supervillain in the form of Flint Marko’s Sandman (played by Thomas Haden Church). The Sandman is actually a rather pathetic character, and while Raimi aims to make him sympathetic like he did with the villains of the first two films, here he fails because Marko is actually a base criminal. Sure, he’s stealing money to help his sick daughter recover — but he’s still stealing money (of course if America had a health care system that wasn’t borderline criminal, none of this would be a problem). So anyway Marko is transformed into the Sandman, and this time around, with suspension of disbelief already straining, the superpower comes off as contrived and silly. So he’s made of sand? How does he colour the sand so he can walk around looking like a normal human? How do you kill someone who can rebuild himself out of extremely common materials? And how the hell does he maintain consciousness even as the inanimate grains of sand composing his body dissipate and waft through the breeze?

While Marko’s busy whining about not being a “bad guy,” meanwhile beating the crap out of anyone who tries to stop him incessantly stealing things, we get another pseudo-villain in the form of some weird sticky black gunk from outer space. Yes, that’s right, the outer space, the one that has never bothered anyone up until this point. Anyway this black goo latches onto Peter and amplifies his aggression, turning him into even more of a douche than he already was. There was potential in this idea. Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus only did the evil things they did because an exterior influence penetrated their psyche and warped their good intentions into evil deeds — the potential is here for the same thing to happen to Peter as Spidey, perhaps turning him into a true menace to New York, who can only be stopped by, oh, I don’t know, the New Goblin. That way Harry can actually be a good guy for once instead of being relentlessly cruel and cold, and Spidey can get a taste of his own medicine. I-rony!

But then Peter manages to rip the black stuff off his body and throw it onto some guy called Eddie Brock, played with amazing incompetence by Topher Grace. Brock serves as a parallel to Peter Parker — he’s also a budding photographer trying to impress his dream girl. But Brock crosses some lines the morally-strict Peter wouldn’t dare to, and then when he becomes infected with the alien venom, he gives himself over totally to evil, so I guess that means it’s okay to beat the stuffing out of the poor guy. So how does this black stuff work? Where does it come from? On its home planet it must have some corporeal co-inhabitants it can be symbiote buddies with, right? How does it have a mind of its own when it doesn’t appear to have a brain? How did it survive the journey here? How does it chemically amplify an emotion? How did a simple lab test with a microscope confirm any of this? A brief overview of some of these rules would be nice. Instead the black goo just becomes distracting and annoying. If an audience doesn’t understand something, it will groan every time it appears in a scene. Why are you breaking all these rules, Sam Raimi?

There’s a few romantic subplots involving Peter’s pseudo-infidelity with cutie Gwen Stacy (Bryce Dallas Howard), Harry’s advances on a confused and strangely vindictive MJ, and MJ’s forced betrayal of Peter’s love, devised with malicious glee (which comes off as completely unconvincing) by Harry once he gets his memory back. None of these distractions ring true, and what’s worse, Peter doesn’t even take his chance to hook up with Elizabeth Banks’ Betty Brant. Shame on you. These dalliances divert attention from the real point of the movie, which is … er …

So here’s what the movie should have been about. The only villain should have been the New Goblin, forget the Sandman and that Venom nonsense — those characters are not in the least compelling, nor even that visually exciting, and they contribute nothing to the story. Explore the lengths to which Harry will go to avenge his father’s death — will he go for Aunt May first, and then MJ, to try and get to Peter, just like his dear old pa? How much of himself or the city of New York will Harry sacrifice in his misguided quest for revenge? Then flip the coin and ask, once again, and with bigger stakes, how much Peter is willing to sacrifice in order to stop crime dead in its tracks — will he kill his best friend for the sake of justice and peace? Do that same MJ-or-the-little-children dilemma scene from the first one, but this time put MJ on the other side of the island, forcing Peter to choose one. Or unmask Peter once and for all, reveal him to the city and the world at large. Do something to challenge Peter Parker at the most fundamental level. Then, Peter can rise to the challenge, and when he doubts himself, Aunt May and MJ will be there for him, and he will tragically go out and kick the Goblin’s ass.

Or, if you’re really dead-set keen on introducing Venom, only put it on Peter. Like I suggested above, turn him into the villain of the picture, alienating his friends and family, and then have New Goblin ironically come to save the day when Black Spidey goes around trashing the city. Harry is the new hero, and Spidey is the new villain, completely lost and disconnected from his roots. Then they can both realise what they’ve done and work together to undo the damage Spidey’s been doing this whole time. Harry can forgive Peter for failing to jump in front of the runaway hoverboard that killed his father, and Peter can forgive himself for doing all these stupid things to everyone in the first place. This way only one of the characters is radically changed, instead of every single one of them. Plus you get a focused, driven conflict between the three best friends. It’s personal, it’s different, and it’s emotionally engaging. Introducing so many new characters after already radically altering your existing protagonist(s) is a bad move, especially if the new characters are going to be as dull and pointless as the Sandman, Venom, and Gwen Stacy.

There is still a good movie buried in here somewhere. The montage of Peter exploring his new black-suit hyper-sexuality is extremely amusing, if a little long. JK Simmons again nails his hilarious role, and is given a little more to do this time, as is Elizabeth Banks as secretary Betty. The finale has a few dollops of vague emotion, a mere echo of the sheer catharsis of the first two films, but still more powerful than what you’d find in most movies. The Goblin-forced break-up scene is also pretty devastating thanks to the performances and timing, and it feels like the Peter Parker of the first two films makes an appearance for this brief but welcome scene. Plus the overall product is so polished it’s hard to hate it.

But the failures threaten to overwhelm the feature. Too many villains, none with enough motivation or sympathy; too many entirely unnecessary subplots and minor characters; too much of a departure from the first films; the running time is too long; the visual effects are way overused this time (black characters flying against black backgrounds? At night?! Arghh, my eyes!); the action scenes seem like unnecessary retreads of the first two films’; but most of all the film lacks the emotional narrative core of the first two. The hero isn’t supposed to completely change after the second act, he’s supposed to find himself, that’s the point of all those brutal challenges. He’s supposed to come to terms with himself, and then go out and fight the real problem, which in this case should have been the actions he took in the first act — killing Norm Osborn and setting his best friend against himself.

While the third Spidey feature doesn’t measure up favourably against the first two, it’s not actively bad as popcorn entertainment. It’s light, fresh, okay to look at, and moves fast enough not to be dull or sleep-inducing. So I can’t give it anything but a thoroughly average score.

That wraps up my Spider-Man weekend. I was both pleasantly surprised and dismally disappointed at the experience, but it was totally worth it. Here’s hoping Raimi and co. can pull out all the stops for Spider-Man 4 (due 2011), and return to more of a Spider-Man 2 vibe.

Spider-Man 3 score

51/100