Your friendly neighborhood webslinger makes Flint Marko gravel in Sam Raimi's SPIDER-MAN 3 - now in theaters. I liked the first SPIDER-MAN a lot, loved the second one, but SPIDER-MAN 3 is just about an unmitigated disaster.
Not because it's a cluttered mess that thinks bigger is better and action scenes are best when they fire past the retina rather than actually lodge in the brain. As a reader of the original Marvel comics since the Ditko days, I'm disturbed by the filmmakers' irreverent disregard for the content and chronology of what might be called the canon. I think the introduction of Gwen Stacy now is pointless and gratuitous, and I could tell that mixing the more wholesome spirit of Silver Age storylines with the darker Venom storyline from the Bronze Age Todd MacFarlane years was likely to be a stinkbomb long before it went off on Opening Day. I was especially disappointed by the sappy back story given to the Sandman, whose potential was further dissipated by all the other converging threats. I was really looking forward to him, to see him discovering the range of his powers, and feel gypped by his relative lack of screen time; it doesn't help that they turned him into King Kong.
I can't understand why Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire can't make Peter Parker seem like a good guy without also seeming borderline learning impaired; likewise, when the symbiote arouses his arrogant, evil streak (this movie's "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" moment), he's not just a short-tempered jerk, but like a strutting glue sniffer on a SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER jag. It's so broad, so lacking in subtlety, it made me feel ashamed to be a fan of the character. Even worse is his open cavorting in the jazz club -- after the cafeteria scene in the first movie and now this, I wouldn't be surprised if Peter Parker starts opening taxi doors with his webshooters in SM4. Surely everyone in New York has seen him unmasked by now, so why not?
It's time for Hollywood to call a moratorium on two things: 1) the use of 9/11-like imagery for cheap frissons, and 2) evil doppelgangers in heroic fantasy. We've been getting the latter since STAR WARS and it's deader than Joseph Campbell. It's one thing to say that we all have good and evil tendencies and the freedom to choose between them, but when you take this spiritual philosophy and amplify it into the unadulterated corn of SM3, the heroes somehow come out of it soiled and the bad guys come out of it slightly ennobled. Before picking which side we're on, we need to know which side we're on, and this movie's moral map is slippery as hell. So many characters here have split natures, it's like they got the cast for half price. SM3 actually suggests that people shouldn't have to pay for their mistakes, that acknowledging them is enough. I was dumbstruck by Sandman's exit, and Venom's fate is so dopey and arbitrary and blink-of-an-eye, I actually had to be reminded 10 minutes later what happened to him.
My beloved, not a reader of the comics, liked this one better than SM2. She also thought the old gentleman playing Uncle Ben this time around wasn't as good as the other one was.
