Review: Spiderman 3

More is less.

Speaking for myself, I thought the first Spiderman was OK. The second installment hit it out of the park. No question.

I feel that Spiderman 2 raised the bar so high that director Sam Raimi overreached himself and tried to tell a grand story by mixing in too many subplots and characters competing with each other for screen time. He substituted scope and scale for the warmth and wit that made those two previous pictures so memorable. This lumbering third installment finds a trio of villains jockeying for screen time amid several half-developed storylines and a darker, self-serious tone that veers into the overwrought.

The opening credit sequence does a beautiful job of showing highlights from the previous two movies and gets you ready for this one, which is set an indeterminate amount of time after the 2nd one. Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) is living his dream life - he and Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) are going strong, he's at the top of his college classes, and much to the consternation of the Daily Bugle’s J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons), Spidey’s become New York’s favorite celebrity. What could go wrong?

For starters all of this success starts to go to our favorite webslinger’s head. He becomes self-involved and doesn’t notice MJ's problems whose life is starting to go downhill after she gets fired from her Broadway show. To be fair, she doesn’t tell Peter anything. (One must ask why the critics hate her in the third film when she was loved in the second and was good enough to get hired in the first place?) Anywho, MJ gets jealous of Peter's platonic relationship with his colorless lab partner Gwen Stacy (Bryce Dallas Howard) when she gives Spidey the key to the city and gives him "their" kiss while he’s hanging upside down.

It’s a bad time to grow an ego, as there’s trouble brewing on several fronts. First, Peter’s former best friend Harry Osborn (James Franco) has discovered his late father’s stash of Green Goblin super-soldier serum, and he’s suiting up for second-generation supervillian-hood with a personal vendetta against Spider-Man.

And speaking of personal vendettas, it turns out the man who murdered Peter’s beloved Uncle Ben wasn’t actually the guy we saw Spidey take out in the first film. In a strange little chunk of revisionist history, we see a bunch of reshot scenes illustrating that Flint Marko (Thomas Haden Church) was the trigger man. As if all this weren’t awkward enough, James Cromwell’s police captain calls Parker and Aunt May down to the station and explains it to them for no obvious reason.

The punchline isn’t only that Church just escaped from prison, but he also accidentally tripped and fell into a top secret science experiment out of Star Trek that, for some reason, was being carried out in the middle of the night—so suddenly he’s the Sandman.

Still not enough story points for you? Well there’s also the matter of this strange alien goo coming from a meteorite that lands conveniently close to the spot where Peter and MJ are stargazing in New York’s Central Park. The goo then attaches itself to Peter’s moped and hangs around inertly in his room for the first 2/3 of the film before attaching itself to Peter and spontaneously transforming into a shiny black costume. It’s a parasitic organism that makes Spidey a lot more aggressive, and causes Pete to grow his bangs out like he’s in an ’80s New Wave band and sway like he’s on Saturday Night Fever.

Then there’s Eddie Brock (Topher Grace), a competitive freelance photographer, who’s trying to muscle his way into Parker’s gig at the Daily Bugle by Photoshopping forgeries of Spider-Man committing robberies so the people of New York will turn on their hero. And that’s before Brock gets up close and personal with the alien goo.

Whew! Raimi—who co-wrote the script with his brother Ivan as well as two-time Oscar winner Alvin Sargent ("Julia," "Ordinary People")-figures out a way to line up these events (sort of). For example, during the early fight between Spidey and Harry (the best action set piece of the film), Harry hits his head and comes down with short-term amnesia, so that he spends most of the movie being an amnesiac pussycat who’s nothing but sunshine and light. MJ hangs out with him for a bit to find some comfort from all her problems. Then Spidey figures out a way to stop the Sandman, but only for a little while. During these rest periods, Peter/Spidey can then deal with other problems.

On the bad side, the problems seem more artificial in Spider-Man 3 than they did in Spiderman 2. Each problem has less breathing room, less time to become organic with gray areas in the middle. The film eventually gets so tangled and top-heavy with its 20 million different plot threads, Raimi has to resort to Peter Parker watching television so news crews can helpfully recap at least an hour’s worth of off-screen events that set the final battle in motion. (Note to aspiring screenwriters: If your superhero needs to watch CNN in order to figure out what’s going on in his own movie, take it as a sign you’ve written yourself into a corner.)

There's the Raimi touch of having (Bruce Campbell) make another appearance, this time as a pseudo French Maître d' and the expected Stan Lee cameo (I'm not against him getting his due, but his cameos don’t seem to be adding anything). Then there's the typical moment where Spiderman does something in front of the cheering NYC crowd. Rather than get out of the way, the New Yorkers stand there and watch the battles when buildings and debris are falling around them. What would it be like to have Spidey fight ONE villain WITHOUT removing his mask in the middle of the brawl? It's amazing everyone in NYC doesn't know who he is by now.

McGuire seems to be a bit bored this go around. There's no spark or excitement in his performance except when he gets taken over by the alien goo and goes dark side—for Peter. He struts down the street dressed in black, accompanied by cheesy music, and women either give him the eye or look at him like he's a creep, goes to jazz clubs, and says "babe" a lot. Hilarious sequence.

Then there's the idea of bringing in the iconic Gwen Stacy, who many fans of the Spiderman comic book knows has a major impact on our hero's life. The problem is, Stacy's impact is felt early on in his career and introducing her into the film world this way and at this time makes absolutely no sense. If they wanted to introduce a woman to make MJ jealous then this character would have been fine, as long as she was called something other than Gwen Stacy.

I liked the Sandman character and the resolution at the end better than I thought I would, but I also hated the revisionist way they turned Sandman into the killer of Uncle Ben. The storyline was handled well, but it felt too much like the Batman origin story where they had to make the hero invested by saying "Hey, I killed your Uncle."

The stuff with Harry was actually very good. Here James Franco really gets to display a real emotional range. The new Goblin designs were real cool (in an edgy bad guy sort of way), everything from the black leather suit, to the mask, to the redesigned Goblin glider were fantastic. I had the feeling this was a guy who could kick Spidey's butt (and should have been the main baddie for the film). The main reason the 3rd film works is because of him.

As good as everything with the Goblin and the Sandman were, much about Venom was terrible. The way he moved in his liquid form, conveniently sat around inert in Peter’s room, to how he looked once it bonded with Brock. I like the cartoon Venom, but the film version got shortchanged and deserved its own movie. Why couldn’t Venom have been brought in for Spiderman 4? The studio will produce it after all, whether or not the original team stays on board. He's one bad guy too many. His introduction into the story causes everything to be crowded, rushed, and overlong. Spider-Man 3 feels like it should end around the 1:40 mark, but like the Energizer Bunny, it keeps going...

The CGI in this takes a step back to the cartoony animation that was in the first film, Spiderman swinging around town looked like a tiny animated spec. The stuff with the Sandman was about as good as it could be. Focusing on the grains of sand and then expanding to see him reassemble after the experiment—very lyrical.

Considering how overloaded the film is, Raimi does juggle the characters and storylines fairly well. People will line up to watch the film and set new opening weekend box office records. But everything is just a little off, or takes a step back. The ending was touching, but I’m stumped on where Peter and MJ are headed now. People love trilogies because it's said that good things come in threes, but this series would have looked better and felt more satisfying had the filmmakers stopped at two.