There is a Peter Parker in all of us – more so than any alien Kal-El, spoiled-rich Bruce Wayne or member of the X-Men mutants. We were all teens once, chasing the girl/guy, yo-yoing between moral conundrums, crumbling at the mercy of so many hormones.
That’s the biggest hook of Spider-Man, now in his third run at Hollywood – he’s truly human inside.
“”Spider-Man 3″” sees director Sam Raimi cramming as much comic lore into the film as possible. The more the merrier for the fanboys, no? And though the box office will undoubtedly be engorged by ticket sales, Raimi’s end product is 140 minutes of overstretched effort. The debut of Spider-Man’s “”black costume”” should have been enough plot fodder – after all, the alien symbiote that consumed Parker and formed the dark threads ate up a year’s worth of comics.
But for “”Spider-Man 3,”” Raimi kneels to the buzzed-up salivations of fanboys and crams in the introduction of comic book mainstays Gwen Stacey (Bryce Dallas Howard), Sandman (Thomas Haden Church) and Venom. Add Harry Osborn (James Franco), who is returning for the blood of his best friend/father’s murderer, and relatability of our hero collapses under the weight of a bloated character list doing a mashed-up, helter-skelter number on the Spidey universe.
As the film begins, the dark, introspective conflict that made “”Spider-Man 2″” at all alluring is glaringly absent. Parker (Tobey Maguire) trades his blatant nerdiness for an overtly happy spirit – he has the girl, he has the powers and his city loves him. Such bliss gives way to more camp, a staple of the comic book that Maguire has never fully grasped.
One minute, Parker’s raspy tone is shuddering in front of kids; the next, it’s barking at Sandman (who Parker discovers murdered his uncle, Ben) with steely, murderous intent. Maguire’s acting range has never been wide enough to encompass the conflicts within and between Parker and Spider-Man – and treading the two personalities accurately is what makes Spidey one of the most humanely relatable heroes around.
The film finds its stride, if only for a short while, when things go south for our hero. The entrance of a new Green Goblin/Harry Osborn, outfitted with an intense cache of new weapons, marks the first of many spectacularly rendered onscreen battles.
All of the film’s fights are grand in scope and setting. Superhuman fracases obliterate skyscrapers and wreck trains. And there’s never been a silver-screen equivalent to the Sandman, who at one point rips through Times Square and leaves in his wake a storm of flying cars. That’s what a budget that runs upward of $250 million can buy you – a whole lot of breathtaking CGI.
But seeing how this film isn’t Pixar-branded, the barometer for quality should rest on the live-action cast. There are a few bright spots: Howard’s Stacey was striking – Raimi visually transformed the once-homely blind girl of “”The Village”” into the gorgeous, buxom blonde of Spidey legend.
The film’s most solid strengths come from the cast’s dark shades. Franco’s maniacal side, unfortunately kept under wraps for most of the film, plots Spider-Man’s demise with a calculated evil usually reserved for Norman Osborn (comics reared Harry as a lesser version of his father). As Brock, Grace plays an unstable slimeball perfectly. And once the symbiote overtakes Parker, Maguire manages to pull a few spine-chilling
