Spider-Man 3: Worthy, But...
I wish superhero movie-makers would finally figure out that by trying to escalate the stakes in the third (or fourth, or fifth) movie of a series by simply throwing in tons of villains does not work. Instead of all of them being big, scary "boss villains," they all become meaningless grunts, with so little time allocated to their character that they become completely disposable to the audience.

More bad guys (or even just more characters) just makes for a more confusing, less emotionally investing, more cluttered movie.

Unfortunately, movie-makers probably won't learn their lesson from Spider-Man 3. Because even though it suffered from these exact problems, Sam Raimi managed to pull off the juggling act without dropping anything too badly. He introduces Venom - and the Sandman - and Harry's now super-powered aspect - and Gwen Stacey and her father. Thank goodness he didn't decide pull the villainous aspect of Peter's professor and mentor, Doctor Conners - who becomes the Lizard in the comics.

Considering the ending, I'd be hard pressed to cut any of those characters, except the character of Gwen Stacey. I love Bryce Dallas Howard, and I guess maybe they felt some guilt about leaving out the character of Gwen Stacey - who's death in the comics signalled the end of the "silver age" of comics in the U.S. (Not that I'm a true comic book geek or anything... I'd aspire to be one, but it takes too much time). But that plot role was already fulfilled by Mary Jane in the first movie (who didn't die). So Gwen in the movie is largely a throw-away character, a replaceable plot device who bears little semblance to her inspiration other than her name and the fact that her father is the chief of police.

Lame.

And it was cluttered, trying to squeeze two movies' worth of material into a single two-and-a-half hour movie. I think it coulda been two really awesome movies. But everyone's contracts were up with the third one, so they got smashed into one movie that seemed "really good" instead of great.

It's too bad that the third movie is the weakest of the three, but really it's just a relative judgement. I enjoyed it a lot. The way they handle the story arc culminating with the Sandman, Harry Osborne, Spider-Man, Mary Jane, and Venom all at the end is - with the exception of some bizarre motivational railroading, particularly on the part of the Sandman - pretty dang awesome. It was particularly satisfying to see the culmination of the war between Harry and Peter which has been escalating over the course of all three movies.

So there. A hopefully relatively spoiler-free (and, unfortunately, detail-free) review. I liked it a lot. A heck of a lot better than what we got stuck with last year (Superman Returns and X-Men 3... ugh). Flaws aside, I'm going to be happy to own this one on DVD and watch it again.
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 9:42 AM (Permalink)