Just Saw a Movie: Spider-Man 3

GRADE: C

If I'd ever written a wholly superfluous review, I'm sure it's this one. I'll forgo providing a synopsis because chances are, you've already seen Spider-Man 3. Last month on YouTube, for all I know.

Before you even saw it, you'd probably already heard that the movie suffers from the X-Men 3 Syndrome, where it asserts itself as the be-all end-all Spider-Man flick, cramming enough characters for two sequels into 2 hours and 20 minutes.

Yeah! So I'm thinkin', all right, Raimi -- try to cap the trilogy and satisfy my Spider-Man movie fix forever. But I did I really need Sandman?

Well, that's interesting because what Sandman does is provide a bad guy who can be both a sympathetic human figure and a towering collosus for the fight scenes --

And I didn't need "New" Goblin, either.

Right, right, but that's a loose end that needed to be tied up, unlike some others...

Venom should have been in the whole flippin' movie.

You know what? Yeah. Not just because Topher Grace as Eddie Brock is the film's most giddy surprise, but that if Venom is done justice, he needs no sideshow villains (unless you want to throw in Carnage, and most fans would be down for that). Back in the day, I was leery to hear that Spider-Man 2 would feature only Dr. Octopus as an adversary, but seeing what impressive depth came from the focus of this pseudo-Father/Son conflict, just think of what fun Spider-Man 3 would have been if it were Venom's movie?

But 3 wants to parcel itself out to too many characters. Rushing through all its subplots, the script has to take numerous shortcuts to move the plot along, and you get some laughably on-the-nose soap opera dialogue as a result. When young Harry Osborn refuses Spider-Man's plea for help, for one, the rich boy's "Alfred"-esque butler steps in to make this solemn revelation:

"When your father died, I cleaned his wound. Spider-Man didn't kill him. He was killed by his own glider."

Priceless.

Very few scenes can take their time to maximize their drama. The mesmerizing sequence in which Sandman first struggles to reclaim his human form out of a mound of sediment is a standout for this reason. And because it is so damn cool to watch.

The Amazing Spider-Man, The Spectactular Spider-Man... My Chemical Spiderman? This is where the film lost me. Tear-jerky Peter Parker embraces the Angst Suit From Outer Space and brushes his bangs down -- over one eye -- and it is played in earnest for some scenes. Most of the time Peter's new personality (thank God) milked for laughs, but it becomes bewildering when they try to make poor Tobey Maguire sexy and badass in addition to emo. The cocky Saturday Night Fever montage that follows is a head-scratcher (some onlooking ladies are blowing him off while random others want to jump his bones -- c'mon, movie, which is it?), and it seems to want the same comedic effect as the campy "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" sequence from Spider-Man 2, but that one worked because we liked that Peter. This one, in spite of the silliness, can go write Mary Jane a love letter in blood for all we care.

Really, the black-suited Peter Parker couldn't have been more emo if he were weeping into his Nightmare Before Christmas hoodie while blogging a poem on the evanescent nature of cigarette smoke. And I'll be damned if footage from the Peter/Harry penthouse fight scene doesn't get sampled for the next Hawthorne Heights music video, interspliced with a silhouetted girl ruthlessly stomping on a human heart.

The Venom suit does this?

I found it difficult to take the rest of the film seriously thereafter. Did Raimi want the audience to laugh uncontrollably when Spidey swung in to land in front of a flowing Star-Spangled Banner? Because we did. Trouble was, by the time Spider-Man had to make his rounds in the end and have all his tearful goodbyes, we were already emotionally jettisoned from the film and the maudlin conclusion was just as laughable as the intended camp.

Spider-Man 3 has the goofiness of the first movie while aspiring to even higher drama than the second. It ends up surpassing neither predecessor. I'm skeptical that after three webslinging movies that Raimi and Co. would sign on for yet another, even though they would likely be paid the GDP of Sweden to do so. For now, consider this sequel the capper, and one that, considering the genre, makes some familiar third-movie mistakes. And then some utterly strange ones.