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Spiderman 3

It’s been a couple of months since I viewed Spiderman in theatres, and I’m still not sure how I feel about it. Spiderman is my earliest and longest-tenured childhood hero. If this film had featured Spidey battling a super-villain from the sewer whose super skills consisted of flinging flaming bags of dogcrap, my initial reaction might have been, “That was the greatest action sequence involving fecal-matter that I’ve ever seen! Spiderman looked so awesome dodging turd-bombs, and the graphics were intense! The flying poop was so real that I could almost smell it! Go see this movie!” That’s why I hesitated to review this film after my first viewing. I know that we can’t always have a clear, objective perspective, but I certainly didn’t want to come-off as a twitterpated cheerleader.

I’m glad I took a few weeks to gather my thoughts because my rose-colored childhood glee can’t possibly compensate for the flaws in this film. And Spiderman 3 is certainly flawed. It’s too long, there are too many villains and not enough time to flesh them all out without coming off stunted and choppy, the soap-opera aspect of Spiderman’s love interest was too sappy and nauseating, and the ending was somewhat anti-climatic. But the action sequences, while too brief, were unrivaled in contemporary films, the comedic bits, both intentional and unintentional, were hilarious, and the high-fiving, feel-good moments were well-timed. The pros and cons were well-balanced, leaving a moderately-watchable film.

The film begins with Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) basking in the glory of his alter-ego’s success and popularity (I don’t want to ruin the plot for those of you who have returned from cryo-stasis or some LSD-laden hippie commune, but apparently Peter Parker’s secret identity is Spiderman. Shhh! Don’t tell the Amish just yet!) His girlfriend, Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst), was beginning her career as a struggling Broadway star. Peter’s success contrasted with Mary’s failure, and a conflict manifested itself in Mary’s jealous sighing and eye-rolling. Thus began the unwanted soap-opera phase of the movie that flared-up every now and then, much to my chagrin. It probably didn’t bode well that I wanted Aunt May (Rosemary Harris) to show up and punch Mary Jane in the face ten minutes into the film.

Compounding the couple’s pending schism was the fact that Peter’s self-indulgence and extreme-narcissism left him completely oblivious to Mary’s plight (He didn’t realize that Mary had been fired from her Broadway gig until the middle of the film, and only after his friend/rival Harry Osborn told him during one of those clichéd villainous monologues I love so much.)

In fact, Peter was so drunk with fame that somehow, at a public appearance as Spiderman, he didn’t see a problem with reenacting the upside-down Spiderman kiss with a woman he had a crush on while the woman he was planning to propose to watched from the crowd. This part of the film was immediately enshrined in the “Are you f#@king kidding me?!?” hall of fame. Yes, I’ll believe that a radioactive spider bit a man and somehow gave him spider powers. Yes, I’ll believe that he fights psychotic, super-genius villains, sandmen, and alien entities. Yes, I’ll believe that said-hero is still flawed and makes mistakes from time to time. But I refuse to believe that he’s stupid enough to kiss another chick in front of God, everyone, and his girlfriend, but still expect everything to be all Disney on the homefront. I almost lost hope in the plot, but fortunately the hilarious proposal scene sucked me back in.

Then there was the much-anticipated confrontation between Spiderman and Harry Osborn (James Franco), a former friend of Peter’s who blames Spidey for his father’s death and seeks vengeance. The fight scene was everything I knew it would be, except it was too short. They could have spared me five minutes of Mary Jane’s incessant whining and bitching, and extended the ass-kicking sequence here. The fight resulted in Harry getting short-term amnesia from being clocked by Spidey. But his memory and thirst for vengeance would soon return…

As if that wasn’t enough, there’s the Sandman saga. Flint Marko (Thomas Haden Church) is a petty-thug who resorted to criminal acts to fund healthcare for his sick daughter. While fleeing the cops, he fell into a molecular-atom-iso-matic-thing-a-ma-jingy, and his body fused with sand. Ironically, Peter Parker finds out that Flint was responsible for his uncle’s death, and seeks vengeance.

Oh yeah… then there’s the Venom saga. Eddie Brock (Topher Grace), a freelance photographer and Peter’s rival, Photoshops some images of Spiderman robbing a bank and tries to pass them off as authentic. Peter, now heavily influenced by an alien entity that fused with his costume, exposes Eddie in a most embarrassing way. Eddie loses his job and vows to seek vengeance against Peter (Notice a recurring theme here?) Eddie gets his chance when Peter finally ditches the entity. The entity fuses with Eddie, creating Venom, a monster with Spiderman’s powers.

(Note #1: Of the film’s villains, Venom gets short-changed the most, which is unfortunate, considering he’s my favorite Spiderman nemesis. His origin and development were treated as side notes instead of the main event, and he was poorly-cast. No offense to Topher Grace. I’m sure he’s great at what he does, whatever it is he does. I don’t recall seeing any of his work, but Topher was far too dweebish to be playing Eddie Brock/Venom. Seeing him as Venom fighting Tobey McGuire as Spiderman was like watching Clash of the Titanic Nerds. No one would think that casting Andy Dick as Lex Luthor would be a good idea, right? The same principle applies to Topher Grace as Venom. Total casting blunder. Whoever approved of this guy should only be trusted to fill the Slurpee machine at the local 7-11.)

(Note #2: The previous note was not a shot a Tobey McGuire. Tobey was perfectly cast as Peter/Spidey. No one could play the role better, hands down. Yes, Tobey is nerdy-looking, but Peter Parker is a nerd. Tobey McGuire is to Peter Parker what Christopher Reeve was to Clark Kent.)

I appreciate the film makers staying true to the comic book origins as much as possible, but even in the comics the villain origins are spaced-out in multiple titles. In fact, sometimes it takes as many as three-to-ten serials just to flesh-out a single villain’s origin, scheme, attack, and defeat/victory. To lump Spiderman’s three primary villains into one feature film cheapens the whole experience. I feel like this movie should have been titled “Spidermans 3 through 6, Truncated for Those with ADD”. As I mentioned, the action scenes were tremendous, but they were way too-short. This is obviously a result of the mass-amount of character-development necessary for the film to make sense to Amish viewers.

For comedy-relief, no one steals a scene like the Daily Bugle’s hot-blooded chief, Jonah Jamison (J. K. Simmons). Simmons played him like the Jamison from the old-school Saturday morning Spiderman cartoon, and I appreciated the throwback. The scene where his secretary repeatedly uses an obnoxiously-loud buzzer to remind him to take his blood-pressure pills had me in tears with laughter. I only wish that he had more scenes like that. They could have played that gimmick to the hilt, using bullhorns, sirens, or whistles.

But the funniest moments of the film are when Peter Parker is under the influence of the entity. The alien symbiote is supposed to make him more aggressive, turning his costume black just like in the comics and cartoons. Typically, Peter is supposed to shift personality-wise from the passive, shy type to the dominating, bullying type. But Tobey plays him like a tough-guy in the way that Steve Martin played The Jerk. He was like, some kind of Uber-Nerd, or Dorkus Supreme. It was like an SNL Roxbury skit, and I’m still not sure if it was intentional or not, but it was pretty funny. I guess Tobey knew that he couldn’t pull-off being intimidating so he resorted to being cheesy and ridiculous. Whatever the case, it worked.

Ultimately, Spiderman 3 disappointed my expectations, but it was still a fun film to watch once I got past the first ten or twenty minutes of melodrama. I will probably buy the DVD and watch it frequently, pretending the first ten minutes never happened. But I’m a guy who enjoys ass-kicking fights regardless of plot, and I’m a die-hard Spiderman fan. Will the average Joe enjoy this film? I give it a 50-50 chance.

1) Story: C (30lbs of sand, venom, and goblin-poop in a 10lb bag)
2) Acting: B+ (Everyone brought their A-game, but Topher Grace as Venom? Really?)
3) Visuals: A+
4) Originality/Innovation: B- (A for effort, C- for execution)
5) Enjoyability Grade: B-
6) Date Material: B
7) Contemporary Element (Will it be watchable two decades from now?): B-
8) Overall Grade: C+

Blind Eye Turning: Poems, Prose, and other Scribbles, by Barry Dawson
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