Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
5/5/07
I love the Summer Movie Season,
and one big reason for that is that I love hype. The process, sometimes
years long, of hearing the announcement, getting updates as the cast assemble,
reading rumors about the plot, seeing photos, watching better and better
trailers, chatting with friends about how unbelievably super AWESOME
it's gonna be, and finally...
Well, it doesn't always work
out. And now I sit before my laptop with a hype hangover, trying
to figure out how, despite all my hopes, Spider-Man 3 went so wrong.
On paper, it's gangbusters:
finally give the fans their look at Venom, perhaps Spidy's most popular
nemesis. Add the Sandman, boosted by amazing new special effects.
And as the cherry on top, allow poor, troubled Harry Osborn to inherit
his father's evil mantle as The Green Goblin (OK, New Goblin if you must...).
Who knows, after the touching finale of SM2, maybe a chance to watch Peter
Parker and Mary Jane finally be a couple for more than a minute and a half.
Plus, where there's Venom, there's that evil black symbiote suit, and the
resulting chance to let Peter take a walk on the Dark Side. How can
this amazing commercial package miss?
We'll get to that in a moment.
Things are going great for
Peter (Toby Maguire) and MJ (Kirsten Dunst). As Spider-Man, he's
the toast of New York, which is set to give him the Key to the City.
MJ is on Broadway, with a featured role in a new musical. The two
of them are out in the park talking about how god-awful happy they are
when a meteor comes down from space, releasing an alien organism that hops
a ride on Peter's scooter, and things start heading downhill. MJ's
reviews are brutal, and she's fired from the production. She doesn't
tell Peter (EARLY WARNING SIGN), who's making plans for the
perfect marriage proposal when he's attacked by Harry (James Franco), now
taking his father's formula and flying around on a jet surfboard as the
New Goblin. Their fight lands Harry in the hospital with amnesia
(GEE, HOW MANY GOOD MOVIES HAVE AMNESIA IN THEM...), which
makes he, Peter and MJ one happy group of friends again, at least until
her growing jealousy of Spider-Man's fame and Peter's self-absorption start
pushing them apart (GETTING REALLY RESTLESS IN MY SEAT NOW).
Meanwhile, Peter learns that the guy he thought killed his Uncle Ben (Cliff
Robertson, always happy to do more flashbacks), was really just an associate
of the real killer, Flint Marko (Thomas Hayden Church). Marko, desperate
for money to help his sick daughter, breaks out of prison and is chased
to a Physics Testing Ground where he falls into a pit full of sand.
There, some kind of molecular disintegration thingie makes him one with
the sand and The Sandman is born. Peter is furious that Marko is
on the loose and his rage makes him a perfect target for the symbiote,
which merges with his suit, turning it black and giving Spider-Man amazing
new powers (so we're told, he mostly just does the same stuff while being
less polite). Peter becomes more reckless and cold, while Harry regains
his memories. He attacks MJ and (IT HURTS ME AS MUCH TO TYPE
THIS AS IT HURTS YOU TO READ IT) intimidates her into breaking
up with Peter. Now with no moral compass at all, Spidy becomes The
Amazing Jerk, and uses his powers to hit on girls and make life miserable
for Eddie Brock (Topher Grace), the unethical Daily Bugle photographer
who's trying to take Peter's job. After a particularly shameless
display (we'll get back to this later, it's one of the most dispiriting
movie scenes of the last ten years) snaps him back to his senses, he resolves
to get rid of the new suit once and for all. But if Peter doesn't
want to bond with the symbiote, surely it can find someone who does...
like Eddie.
It's clear early on that
Spider-Man
3 suffers from a problem common to high-numbered sequels: Franco,
Dunst, and particularly Maguire's hearts just aren't in it the way they
used to be. Of course, look at their material! Once upon a
time, Peter and Mary Jane were standing out in their adjoining back yards
talking about their hopes and dreams. Just three short years ago,
her “Go get 'em, Tiger,” was one of the great movie Happily Ever After
moments. The ability to identify with Pete, MJ and their troubled
pal Harry as real people always set the franchise apart. And now,
they find themselves as regulars on Spider-Man Hospital. SM3
suffers from all the pitfalls of the daytime soap: friends and lovers
who won't confide in each other for no apparent reason, people blackmailed
into lying to each other, and that awful, ridiculous scene where Peter
takes Gwen Stacy (Bryce Dallas Howard) to the bar where MJ's taken a job
as a singing waitress so he can publicly upstage her. The A Night
at the Roxbery buffoon Peter becomes under the symbiote's influence
is so pitifully the wrong way to go with this material, I can only guess
that Sam Raimi must be a really big fan of Superman 3.
Across the board, the film
is too full of itself, too self-congratulatory. Everywhere, crowds
cheer for Spider-Man and the action stops for cutaways to little kids having
SO! MUCH! FUN! watching him. Raimi desperately falls back again
and again on the jammed door to Peter's apartment (I swear, this overstuffed
film must contain five full minutes of various characters trying to pull
it open) to remind us that he's still Plain Old Peter Parker, but it's
just not so. The franchise has gone soft, and no longer knows what
the Real Life it once so admirably shot into the superhero formula is like.
I could see at the end that the movie wants to say something important
about revenge and forgiveness, but the characters just aren't human enough
to pull it off.
All of this is all the sadder
because the two new villains, in what screen time they can snatch back
from the heroes, are wonderful. Church is tremendously troubled,
and his condition is a great metaphor for the notion that some have a life
of crime thrust upon them. The Sandman effects are among the best
I've ever seen, particularly an early show-stopper where he first tries
to reassemble his body. Sand slowly forms into a humanoid shape and
then... collapses. It's shocking, and the movie makes the Sandman
wonderfully PG-13 gross, about the only sign that Big Hollywood Raimi once
made the Evil Dead (well, there is the Bruce Campbell cameo, but more on
that later). Grace gives the movie's best performance. Eddie
is a perfectly pitched loser, the kind of guy who'd be a psycho if he only
had more initiative. And the symbiote gives him that boost.
I loved the way Venom's trademark head full of sharp teeth pulls back to
reveal the hateful person inside, and Grace really relishes these scenes.
He's left That 70's Show far in his rear view mirror. Alas,
Venom isn't an FX achievement on a par with The Sandman, he suffers from
the same PS2 CGI look that's always made Spidy himself seem no more than
85% realistic. And this movie really overcranks the action scenes,
making everything happen so fast that my mind couldn't really keep a handle
on where and when everything was. Not that the film hurts for spectacle.
You do get some truly remarkable action sequences, including an early show-stopper
where an out-of-control crane slices and dices an office building cutting
out both the floor above and the one below where Gwen is standing.
A record budget north of 250 million is clearly on screen, just not in
the screenplay.
Ultimately, the movie has
so much trouble making the four villains (evil Peter counts as well) work
together that it must resort to the dreaded “Villains go on TV and call
the hero out for a downtown showdown” device to get everyone together for
the big finish. Not since Commisoner Gordon appeared on Batman's
viewscreen at the beginning of Batman and Robin to announce “There
is a new villain in town and his name is Mr. Freeze!” has a superpowered
fight scene felt so tacked-on. I suspect there's a much longer cut
lying around someplace waiting to be a Special Edition DVD. There
are scene transitions that push Persistence of Plot Vision (the tendency
of your brain to explain how characters got from Point A to Point B whether
the movie explains it or not) to its' limit, and not only is the trailer's
best line (doubly cruel, as it came from MJ, who barely has one good line
left) nowhere to be heard, but I couldn't even imagine where it would have
fit.
But I suppose there are enough
of you out there to whom none of this matters, who really only want to
know two things: “How were Stan Lee and Bruce Campbell?!?”
At least here, I can respond “Above average!” Just about every
Marvel geek will get a smile out of Lee's one line, and Campbell's turn
as the Maitre d' of the French restaurant where Peter hopes to propose
to MJ is utterly hilarious, easily the best of his three SM cameos.
Now could somebody please get this guy a real role in a real movie???
I still occasionally go on
rants about the 379 things that could have been changed to fix Batman
and Robin, so I suspect that ten years from now I'll be doing the same
for the sad missed opportunity that is Spider-Man 3. Given
that both Maguire and Dunst have expressed misgivings about coming back
for a forth go-round, I shudder to think that this is the last we'll see
of them in these roles. But if the lazy effort they and Raimi put
forth here is all they've got left, perhaps it's time to hand that webline
to someone else.
Speaking of which, have you
seen those cool pics of the suit for next summer's Iron Man movie?
Now THAT'S gonna rock!
That very night, I watched Spider-Man
2 on cable, which inspired still more vitriol in my 5/6/07 blog:
Just when I thought I'd ranted
and raved enough about how disappointed I was by Spider-Man
3, last night I happened to catch its' predecessor, Spider-Man 2
on cable. I hadn't seen it in a couple years (I'd really meant to
re-watch my DVD copy last week, but didn't get around to it), so while
I could easily see how inferior the new sequel is, I didn't realize just
how great the gap was in virtually every aspect of the production.
Obviously, there's the performances.
Alfred Molina's Doc Ock is one of the greatest Supervillain performances
in movie history, shining both as an evildoer and his sympathetic alter-ego,
so some dropoff there was to be expected. Indeed, the performances
by Topher Grace and Thomas Hayden Church are the best ones in the new movie.
But the change in the “regulars” is downright shocking. Toby Maguire,
who fused heroism, doubt and love so perfectly in first two movies, is
out to lunch in a role that asks him to be only smug, mean or “good”.
All the dark shading is gone from James Franco's Harry. Watching
him break that mirror and discover his father's legacy is enough to make
a fan weep at the missed opportunities. Now he's not even so much
mad as just working Really Hard to keep his voice deep. And listening
to Kirsten Dunst delivery Mary Jane's climactic speech at Pete's apartment,
it's amazing how little feeling of any kind she seems to muster this time
around. Almost as amazing as seeing how little writers Sam and Ivan
Raimi and SM2 writer Alvin Sargent seem to think it takes to break
this wonderful couple up. I'm working on walling SM3 off in
my brain so its' ruinous handling of these characters, and the lack of
enthusiasm the cast showed for playing them, doesn't destroy my joy in
future viewings of the other two movies.
But there's a lot more to
it than just the people. Take a look around Peter's apartment, Harry's
mansion, any of the movie's spaces, and while the walls and furniture are
unchanged, they don't even look like the same places. We call that
“cinematography”, folks, and while Bill Pope did the honors on both movies,
the lush, cinematic spaces of SM2 have been replaced by bright,
TV sitcom-like color schemes for the sequel. Doubly weird for a movie
that's ostensibly “darker” than its' predecessor. Danny Elfman's
trademark skill as the composer cradles every moment of SM2 in mood
and thrills. I only noticed Christopher Young's work on SM3
when it was reverting awkwardly to Elfman's themes.
Sam Raimi's done enough damage
to his own legacy both as writer and by directing the actors, but his struggles
extend to the handling of the action sequences. Watch the climactic
battle between Spider-Man and Doc Ock, with all its' different layers of
danger coming from all sides, the realistic weight and inventive use of
all the material being pulled in by Octavius's machine, and the way important
character beats between Peter, Mary Jane, and Octavius are playing out
throughout the scene. Then compare (SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!!)
with the SM3 finale, that long, overblown, unmotivated tag team
match between Venom and Sandman/Godzilla (why on Earth does he look that
way? Because he's pumped full of rage from one brief conversation
with a creature he doesn't know about how “The Spider doesn't want to let
you help your daughter”? When he's going to be positively marshmallowy
when he speaks to Peter after the fight ends?) and Spider-Man/”New Goblin”.
First, there's the movie's action strategy. Character #1 punches
Character #2 so hard #2 is made to fly really far, possibly through some
window or wall. Then, Character #2 returns the favor, with no real
accumulation of damage or injury until someone finally strikes a blow that
Really Hurts. There wasn't one moment in the movie where I felt the
need to duck or wince for any of the characters (and I do that at the movies
ALL THE TIME) because there's no weight or stakes to any of the fighting.
As for the characters, any real reconciliation between Peter and Harry
is ruined by the Butler Ex Machina who alerts Harry to his CSI-like findings
about his father's death, making forgiveness unnecessary. And from
there all the talk between Peter and Eddie Brock is for nothing (yeah,
I enjoyed the “I like being mad” line, but it's still just posturing).
And what does Harry's death really do other than get The Ugly Guy out of
the way? Yes, he sacrifices himself for Peter, but in just the kind of
“I get out of this sort of thing every single time the movie doesn't need
to kill someone off” scenario that doesn't really suggest he even needed
saving. At least Doc Ock's out-of-control machine demands a sacrifice,
and who other than the man who made it happen? All Harry's really
guilty of is the movie's Cardinal Sin of not asking the right people the
right questions. Peter's forgiveness of The Sandman is an interesting
moment, probably the only one in the film that's truly well-acted by Maguire,
but it's too little, too late.
I told you in my review that
I'd still be going on about this movie in ten years. You know I'm
not gonna stop in one day :-)
I've read that the movie
shattered all known box office records over the weekend: I'm always
happy to see our embattled movie theater industry get the boost, but I'm
curious now to see how all those ticket buyers react. Am I the only
one who found this sequel heart-breakingly sub-standard? I'll have
to work on getting my hype hat on for the Pirates of the Caribbean
finale on Memorial Day, but it's gonna be hard to move past this disappointing
start to my favorite movie time of year. |
