|
SPIDER-MAN 3 (2007)
Stop it, you're hurting me! Eek. I've never seen a franchise so quickly, so thoroughly squander the good will of its fans. I'm not a big Burton-Batman fan, but I understand why Schumacher's movies are so hated by them, and this is like if there was no Batman Forever, and Batman & Robin was made by Tim Burton. Yeah, it is that bad. There's so much that's offensively, painfully wrong about this movie. One gets a very strong impression that Sam Raimi, and most returning actors, have made a concerted effort to ensure they never get typecast as "the Spider-Man people". This time, Spider-Man faces a septuple threat. I know, one villain was good enough for the first two Spider-Man movies, and why screw up a good thing? Part 3 is like two and a half hours long, and seven villains is just total haywire clusterfuckery. Calling this movie cluttered is like calling those people with fifteen years of newspapers in their living rooms unkempt. First is the Sandman (Thomas Hayden Church), who gets his powers by running around in the dark and falling into a hole. The people in charge of the hole that gives people superpowers are never heard from again (too bad, some of those scientists were sexy in that sexy-scientist way) and one assumes that people being turned into intelligent, motile piles of sand are quite removed from the conclusions they're looking for and beneath their notice. Some scientists, they. Church has obviously worked out a lot, and he brings a hell of a sad-eyed pity party to the show, but it's not enough to make me forget that by the end of the movie he has a lot to answer for, which he doesn't, and his main motivation throughout isn't just unresolved, but seemingly forgotten (uh, why exactly did he team up with Venom to fight Spidey for the climax? He had no grudge or strategic objective against Spidey. For that matter, why did he just disappear halfway through the fight, and then reappear at the end just to be all I've-done-some-bad-things-but-I'm-trying-to-be-a-good-man-type shit?). I liked his stumbling, collapsing attempts to master his new made-of-sand nature, but Parker did a lot more work mastering his powers, and I would think that slinging a few shots of goo around probably doesn't compare to BEING MADE OF SAND. By the way, it turns out by astonishing coincidence, The Sandman is actually the guy who killed Parker's uncle...in an extremely dumb way (basically amounting to, "I didn't mean to kill him, I mean I just had my loaded gun pointed at him and my finger was on the trigger and oops!"). Which shouldn't make anyone but the most easily manipulated feel the slightest bit more badly for him. Second is Parker's friend Harry, who isn't much of a friend to Parker because he's still convinced Parker's responsible for the death of his dad, the Green Goblin from the first movie. (this misconception is cleared up late in the movie by a butler who knows the truth - oh great, fine fucking timing you stupid butler, you could've done this two movies ago and saved everybody involved a lot of grief) Harry's juiced himself up with Green Goblin 'roid-rage juice, he has a snazzy new goblin-glider and a new mask, but he's basically the Green Goblin all over again, though I guess we can just call him Harry. Harry has a pretty good airborne battle with Parker early in the movie, though Parker takes beatings in it that would smash a normal human into liquid. At this point, one suspects that Spider-Man faces no real threat from bludgeoning force, which is pretty much confirmed later when repeated, crushing blows from a Sandman the size of a junior high school make for a drawn-out "Oh the horror!" scene but have no lasting effect - you'd think being held against a solid surface and repeatedly smashed with tons and tons of rock would, like, break a rib or something. We later learn that Harry's pumpkin bombs are woefully underpowered, incapable of killing people even when they explode six inches from their heads. Third is Venom, the extraterrestrial black slime that crashes into the earth about a hundred feet from Parker (wow, what are the odds?), and ends up infecting him later with a tiny bit of itself, covering him with itself and taking the shape of a black Spidey suit - to which Parker reacts without the slightest alarm. While he's gallivanting about marvelling at how cool it is to wake up in hanging off the side of a building in a new costume with enhanced powers and not even asking himself the obvious question (which is, of course, "Okay, what the fuck?")...I, having a little more information than Parker, am wondering uh...there's still a shitload of alien Venom symbiote crawling (in an admittedly nifty, leapfrogging way) around Central Park, presumably Venom-ing everything in sight...isn't there? Shouldn't there be? Anyway, the Venom symbiote amplifies Parker's bad side, causing him to do a showoffy dance number, strut around the streets of New York in a pretty blatant Saturday Night Fever homage, and get an emo haircut which in one shot, he actually has to head-flick out of his eyes, South Park goth kid style. What were they thinking? Who is so out of touch that they think this is an effective illustration of a hero's dark side? Don't they understand, everybody laughs at these emo kids, that they're trapped in a vicious cycle of emo-ness where everybody kicks their asses because they're emo, and they're emo because everybody's always kicking their asses (even the male cheerleaders)? Fourth villain is Eddie Brock, a romantic and professional rival of Parker's. Their early antagonism makes sense I guess (they're not even interested in the same girl yet) but the human side of Brock gets lost quickly when he's such a poor sport about being exposed in a deception that he's lucky he got away from without having to sell his organs to pay for the lawyers. He even goes to church and prays to his god to kill Peter Parker for him (guess Falwell's nonsense didn't die with him). Topher Grace plays Brock as a continuation of a cockier-than-usual Eric Foreman, and he's still kind of funny, his screentime being more consistently enjoyable than most people here. Grace apparently bleached his hair for the part; I know still confuse him and Tobey Maguire sometimes. If part 4 can cast Elijah Wood, we'd have a trifecta of sorts. Brock acquires superpowers of his own later in the movie, by standing in the most fantastically right place at the right time - wow, of all the people that could have been standing right there right then (which, given the setting and time, would usually be nobody), who would've thought it would've been somebody with a grudge against Peter Parker? The fifth threat is Parker's bungling romance of Mary-Jane, careening toward ruin even without the Venom influence. Stupid Parker at one point, on TV and certainly in full view of Mary-Jane, actually does the upside-down Spidey-kiss (which you'll remember from the first movie) WITH ANOTHER GIRL, and he needs it explained to him in the most laboriously explicit terms that this hurt his girlfriend's feelings. (this is the same stupid Parker that needs it explained to him by a sweet 70-something cookie-baking old lady that she doesn't take a lot of bloodthirsty pleasure in murderous revenge) Not that she's completely innocent here; she gets two musical numbers in this movie. That's two musical numbers, and a dance number, in this Spider-Man movie. Remember what I said about Schumacher? The sixth, and most terrible villain in Spider-Man 3 is Peter Parker's exploding, mushroom-cloud ego. He's absolutely insufferable from minute one, long before Venom comes along and makes him like a million times worse. I know dorky Parker comes from a place of working-class outsiderness, and that the adulation of a city might get to his head a little, but expressing his pleasure aloud, repeatedly, to no one except us dumb audience members who apparently need it explained to us tells us nothing that isn't more elegantly demonstrated just by the look on his face and his cheerful willingness to ham it up at a key-to-the-city ceremony (a scene which shows off the movie's own merch in a gesture of product-placement chutzpah not seen since Jurassic Park). And that's when he's still "good" Parker. Later on he's giving the "gun finger" to chicks on the street, who all orgasm at the sight of him, strutting around in a new suit, playing piano at a jazz bar...the only times Parker isn't annoying in this movie, he's just kinda there, fulfilling the duties of the story. The seventh villain is director Sam Raimi, whose loss of understanding of what made the first two movies work suggests the onset of senility. There's this brief, one-second, out-of-nowhere shot of Spidey, retuning from a tragic absence, making his re-appearance by running in front of a majestically unfurled American flag - the logical successor to that tribute to the spirit of New York in the first movie, I guess. If there's such thing as a groan-o-meter, which gets into the red zone that one time Batman's airplane poked over the clouds just so it could hover for a second in front of the full moon, this would melt its circuits. Spider-Man 3 also features the most brutally ham-fisted Stan Lee cameo yet. It's like he comes in, says "Hi, I'm Stan Lee!" and then says "By the way, I'm Stan Lee." What's to like here? Well, it cost a quarter of a billion dollars, and for sure, it looks like a movie somebody spent a lot of money on. You can tell the FX guys love their work, even though that can be said of few other people here. Bryce Dallas Hayward is appealing as Gwen Stacey, and there are a couple of kinetic, enjoyable action sequences early on, like one where errant construction machinery slices through New York skyscrapers like a red-hot katana through soft-serve ice cream. It's not believable for a second, but where else are you going to see that? (This question gets an easy answer with the movie's blatantly King Kong-inspired climax, which was a lot more fun with T-Rexes. But then, what isn't?) J.K. Simmons is still a howl as J. Jonah Jameson, and Elizabeth Banks is still the sexiest Miss Brant you could ask for. Where is the elegance, the humanity, the excitement of Spider-Man 2, a movie considered probably more widely than any other as the greatest super-hero movie ever made? This movie reeks of a fully intended suicide. If it wasn't, I can't imagine what would've caused Raimi to lose touch so quickly, so completely. (c) Brian J. Wright 2007 BACK TO THE S's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |