The Big Whatsit

This review contains minor spoilers. 

Spider-Man 3 manages the rather difficult feat of cramming masses of plot, character building and action into its 140 minutes, and yet somehow seems to go on for much longer. By the end, The Boy was squirming in his cinema seat, and he wasn’t the only one. Pummelled into submission by more CGI than I’ve probably seen in an entire series of Doctor Who, Spidey’s third outing tried to do way too much. Not only were there three enemies for your man to fight, we also got the usual emotional underpinning, a plotline between Peter and Mary Jane that seemed a bit irrelevant, and sadly the smaller joys of the series - J Jonah Jameson, Bruce Campbell’s cameo, the ‘Rent!’ landlord - becoming marginalised.

The Spider-Man films have worked thus far because they managed to attach compelling, logical and not too dense superhero yarns to an overall arc that was emotionally satisfying. There was nothing too beyond the workmanlike about both the Green Goblin and Doc Ock, yet they were well rendered, showed real streaks of cruelty, and had a semblance of connection to Peter Parker that made sense. Within the wider mythology, they helped to develop the wider rise of Spidey, whilst teaching our young hero things about life itself. Doctor Octopus especially was a delight. As he terrorised New York, Parker’s doubts in what it meant to be Spider-Man made for a delicious, witty and fun experience that had masses of heart. The film had the time and pace to let us right into Peter’s life, showing the lows of a superhero’s life along with its obvious highs. Spider-Man 2 made back more than twice its lavish $200m budget, and did so without compromising its essential values.

In comparison, Spider-Man 3 looks a bit of a mess, a luxuriant dog’s dinner. Bits of what made the series so good are still intact, yet it screams of excess. Its running time, lashings of CGI and bewildering plot strands seem to be intended to leave the viewer punch drunk. By the end, I was more than ready to go home, hoping there wouldn’t be a further ten minutes of fall-out tacked on after the final fight - there are, and no apology to bladders anywhere! - and frankly a little bored by the gigantic emptiness of it all.

Story wise, we pick up a short while after the events of chapter two, with Spider-Man a hero of the city and Peter very much in love with MJ. Life is good, but naturally this is just temporary, as grief-stricken Harry Osborne soon shows up as the young Green Goblin to vanquish his dad’s killer. In the meantime, an escaped convict who is identified as Ben Parker’s real killer falls into some sort of nuclear testing facility and is transformed into a sand-based being who can dissolve himself, pack a sandy punch, etc. Elsewhere, a meteor crashes in Grand Central, releasing this black alien goo that attaches itself to Peter and, while enhancing his abilities, brings out the extremes of his personality. Mary Jane’s Broadway career suffers a quick still birth, and she’s left to watch Peter’s hero status with envy as she is made to accept any singing gig going. Some young chancer shows up at the Daily Bugle, claiming to be a better photographer than Parker and determined to outdo him, at whatever cost. Aunt May’s still on the scene to deliver platitudes, especially after Pete tells her he wants to marry MJ, even though there’s a new girl on the scene, who rivals him in science class whilst doing some modelling and PR work for the city and, and *gasp* *splutter* (out of breath… too much plot…)

Whoever thought so much story needed to be inserted into a single film, presumably Sam Raimi himself, needs to take a look at the above summary, which covers around the first hour of its running time. Incidentally, this is the good hour, as the movie then begins to try and unravel its various strands, reaching some kind of resolution and falling over its webbed feet too often. It begs the question - were this many enemies really needed? Surely, the Goblin and Sandman would have done, leaving Venom, apparently a fans’ favourite, for another day. We were always going to get that tussle between Peter and Harry, so leaving that in here was wholly justified, whilst ‘Sandy’ is so well rendered, both graphically and by Thomas Haden Church’s sensitive performance, that I have no problems with his appearance. Instead, we not only get the pair of them, but also Peter turning ‘bad’ via the black goo’s influence, leading to a whole new story arc that is fairly unnecessary, hilarious (not always intentionally) and without any kind of satisfying conclusion.

The Venom story brings to mind the bit where Superman goes wrong in Superman III, you know, the forgettable episode with Richard Pryor on skis. Looking back, it’s hysterical how the makers turned their hero into a wrong ‘un - straightening the Leaning Tower of Pisa, getting pissed, flicking peanuts into a mirror, growing some facial hair, being a bit surly - and much the same happens here. ‘Bad Peter’ doesn’t stop being a hero, as such, he just starts wearing black eyeliner, black threads, and letting his fringe flop down, adding the odd insolent pout for good measure. Somehow, this is supposed to transform him from the wholesome boy we’ve come to know, and to a degree he’s so nice and whiney during much of the movie that it’s a relief to see him kick loose once or twice. A frankly horrible early scene during which he mouths MJ’s lines along with her singing at the theatre shows the nice Pete at his most saccharine, so it’s kind of good to see him strut his unfunky stuff in a riot of self-indulgence, once the venom begins to kick in. This isn’t Peter, we’re told; it’s more a dark side of his personality that’s brought out by the alien matter. Only, it isn’t even all that dark. It’s just silly.

This plays out against complications between Peter and MJ that make for the weakest part of the tale. The couple start S3 in love, and then suffer various pitfalls along the way that really do seem to have been tacked on for the sake of providing a plot. It all brings to mind the story in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, where the makers somehow had to contrive a tale that would cause problems for a man and woman who are clearly mad for each other, and failed completely. It’s exactly like that here. I didn’t really see what Mary Jane’s problem with Peter was, and certainly at no time thought there was anything that couldn’t be resolved by talking about it, a possibility not even explored in the movie. Partly, this is a major plot weakness, but also a sorry slur on the acting of Kirsten Dunst, who doesn’t do much with her underwritten part. It’s simply not easy to care for her, even when - in one of the worst, laziest aspects of the film - she’s reduced to her stock role of damsel in distress.

I sort of hoped that Peter might run off with preppy Gwen Stacy (Bryce Dallas Howard) instead. At least she has spark, which is more than could be said for the morose MJ, even if it’s never explained in any great detail what she’s doing in the story apart from to add to the resentful woes of Eddie Brock (Topher Grace), Pete’s rival and ultimately Venom. Perhaps he could have even walked off into the sunset with Rent!’s daughter, the saucy Scandinavian type with a nice line in cookie making. Anything but more MJ. At the movie’s close, the couple have a moment of reconciliation, but neither looks especially happy about it, as though they’re too tired to do any more than collapse into each other’s arms. The scene brings to mind nothing more than the ‘You’ll do!’ mentality that makes people get together at the end of graduation balls.

On the plus side, Sandman looks fantastic. I liked the indulgent scene where we first see him as a sandy entity, collapsing into grains several times before he manages to make himself solid once more. Thomas Haden Church manages to wring some sympathy for his character, whilst the CGI is never better than when dissolving parts of the actor into sand… and then back again. Speaking of computer graphics, there’s an awful lot of it on display in S3 generally. Of course, the standards in the movie are as good as it gets on a technical level, meaning you rarely see the joins, and the action can be cranked up to dizzying speeds whilst the graphics keep up far better than the naked eye. However, did there really need to be so much of it? Watching the first two instalments, I got the impression that the effects budget was plunged into a few big action sequences, working on a ‘less is more’ mentality. Here, the CGI drips off the screen constantly; rarely a few minutes pass without some expensive effect whizzing past. Is it really necessary? Or is it yet another aspect of the movie’s over-indulgence?

1,500 words in, and this article’s getting to be as bloated as the movie it’s here to criticise. I wanted to like Spider-Man 3. Having read the reviews, which ranged from dismissive to mildly disappointed, I hoped it would still be a blast, believing the franchise hasn’t let me down in the past so it won’t this time. Unfortunately, it did. The really sad part about it is the wit that coursed through the other movies is largely gone, replaced by a few cameo scenes that, whilst funny, don’t occur often enough. If Raimi can learn anything from this, lesson one must be to find a new project that gives Bruce Campbell something to do. He’s fantastic. The film isn’t. I read elsewhere that it’s a bit like watching any other big money blockbuster, that it has lost the quirks and nuances that made it so good previously. A shame really. There’s a great movie struggling to break free from this, one that’s a good half hour shorter and stripped of its worst excesses.

The TSPDT Top 1,000 Update

Anyone who read the Lists of Fury blog here will know I’m committed to seeing the one thousand best films of all time, as compiled from critics’ own favourites. My latest viewings (bringing the total watched to 209) are:

The Apartment (No. 77) - brilliant, and though I want to call it a comedy, the film features some real hard-hitting issues and dramatic notes along the way. I especially liked the appearance of Fred MacMurray, who puts in a sleazy turn as C C Baxter’s powerful and corrupt boss. As for Jack Lemon and Shirley MacLaine, they were good looking back then, weren’t they? Baxter’s frankly horrific looking job reminded me of a thousand awful call centres, and I was genuinely moved by much of the modern, moral mess that is at the centre of the film. Highly recommended.

The Lady from Shanghai (370) - I enjoyed it, as I would any decently made film noir, but that’s about the sum total of what I saw in it. Everett Sloane steals the film as Rita Hayworth’s husband, and Orson Welles is on fine form whilst sporting a contrived ‘Oirish’ accent. Talking of Welles, this is no Kane, but it sets out to be more fun, and as usual there are some superb shots to admire, such as the house of mirrors climax that has been copied a number of times.