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Spider-Man 3 Running time 2:19 Rated PG-13 ShowPlace West, ShowPlace East
As the third installment of the Spider-Man franchise begins,
Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) is sitting on top of the world. He and
long-suffering girlfriend Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst) are in love,
he’s doing great in graduate school, and New Yorkers have accepted
Spider-Man as their resident savior. What could go wrong? Plenty, as fate
(and director and co-screenwriter Sam Raimi) would have it. Not only does
Parker’s former best friend, Harry Osborn (James Franco), unleash an
all-out campaign to kill him, but Parker is also infected by an alien
organism that adheres to whatever it touches, releasing the aggressive side
of its host. To make matters worse, the new supervillain on the block,
Flint Marko (a.k.a. the Sandman, played by Thomas Haden Church), keeps
crossing Spider-Man’s path. These plot elements alone would make for a
well-stocked narrative, but Raimi also includes a love triangle involving
Mary Jane, Peter, and his lab partner, Gwen Stacy (Bryce Dallas Howard); a
rivalry between Peter and slimy news photographer Eddie Brock (Topher
Grace); and a reexamination the murder of his Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson)
when police discover that Marko may have had something to do with it.
Although Raimi and his co-writers should be applauded for trying to apply a
sense of comic-book pacing to the movie, the result is overwhelming and
ultimately exhausting. As far as the technical aspects are concerned, the
visuals are of the highest quality and push the current technology to its
limits, but this proves to be a double-edged sword. The Sandman’s
first appearance is an awe-inspiring sight, but the film’s final
battle, which finds four different characters careering about midtown
Manhattan, is far too difficult to follow, inspiring confusion rather than
wonder.
This article appears in Apr 26 – May 2, 2007.
