Movie Spin

Spider-Man 3 Reviews

2007-05-17T09:03:00.000-07:00

Spider-Man 3 (2007)
Average Rating: 3.6 / 5

Spider-Man 3 Info: Spider-Man 3 is a 2007 superhero film written and directed by Sam Raimi, with a screenplay by Ivan Raimi and Alvin Sargent. It is the third film in the Spider-Man film franchise based on the fictional Marvel Comics character Spider-Man. The film stars Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Thomas Haden Church, and Topher Grace.. The film begins with Peter Parker basking in his success as Spider-Man, while Mary Jane Watson begins her Broadway career. Harry Osborn still seeks vengeance for his father's death, and an escaped convict, Flint Marko, falls into a particle accelerator and is transformed into a shape shifting sand monster. An alien symbiote crashes to Earth and bonds with Peter, influencing his behavior for the worse. When the symbiote is abandoned, it finds refuge in Eddie Brock Jr., a rival photographer, causing Peter to face his greatest challenge. Spider-Man 3 was commercially released in multiple countries on May 1, 2007, and released in the United States in both conventional and IMAX theaters on May 4, 2007. The film received generally mixed reviews from critics, in stark contrast to Spider-Man 2's highly positive reviews, yet the film broke most of the opening weekend records, both in the United States, and in foreign markets, including records held in IMAX theaters.

Spider-Man 3 Review - Guidelive.com

2007-05-17T09:01:00.000-07:00

By CHRIS VOGNAR / Staff Writer

Catching his breath after his initial tussle with Sandman, Spider-Man wonders out loud where all these super villains keep coming from. But Spidey is a bright guy, and he should know better. They come from the sequel factory, that ever-churning, self-perpetuating Hollywood machine with the mandate you can sum up in two words: more and bigger.

As you can imagine, the “less is more” aphorism does not fit the formula. So for Spider-Man 3, the exciting but bloated blockbuster that heralds the arrival of the summer movie season, we get not one, not two, but three baddies: Harry Osborn (James Franco), son of the late Green Goblin; Sandman (Thomas Haden Church), an escaped convict who has the misfortune of stumbling into a pit of sand during an atomic experiment (bad luck, that); and Venom (Topher Grace), a hotshot photographer who hates Peter Parker and turns into a snakelike creature when part of Spidey’s malevolent new black suit drips onto him at church and …

Oh, never mind.

Simply put, Spider-Man 3 could use a healthy dose of simplicity. It boasts the action, the spectacle, even the psychological depth that gave the first two episodes their pop culture zing. But the streamlined oomph that made this the best superhero movie series to date has waned or, rather, has seen much of its humanity strangled away. Franchise Fatigue is setting in, manifested in an excessive running time (140 minutes) and at least one plot strand too many. It’s like a pizza with too many toppings: still pretty tasty but a bit soggy by the time you get to the end.

A wounded juggernaut remains a juggernaut, and there’s no reason to think Spider-Man 3 won’t break the bank just as its predecessors did. Like 300, the box-office surprise of the year that offered bloodshed for the guys and beefcake for the ladies, the Spider-Man movies are versatile in their appeal. The combat showstoppers, though still too CG to be felt as much as they’re admired, should thrill fanboys to no end. Meanwhile, the heart of the franchise still beats to the rhythm of relationships. More sensitive viewers of Spider-Man 3 will surely empathize with Mary Jane (still Kirsten Dunst) as Peter/Spidey (still Tobey Maguire) gets too caught up in the whole superhero thing to give the poor woman the attention she deserves.

In all fairness, the webslinger has a lot on his plate. It seems Flint Marko, who becomes the aforementioned Sandman, had something to do with the death of Peter’s Uncle Ben. Peter is consumed by thoughts of vengeance — much like Harry, who blames Peter for his father’s death — and his new threads, created by a nasty black substance from outer space, have an aggressive life of their own. For a short time, it even turns Peter into a strutting, preening ladies man: a spider on the prowl.
The saga of Dark Peter leads to the one egregiously shark-jumping sequence in the picture, an homage to Saturday Night Fever that feels like it belongs to another, inferior movie. It passes quickly enough — OK, maybe not quite quickly enough — but it’s also a symptom of a greater ill. Spider-Man 3 is way too pleased with its own shtick, and it sprinkles little pieces of busyness around as if the filmmakers didn’t have much confidence in the material. What would be smart and cute in moderation becomes cumbersome in abundance.

So it’s a good thing Spider-Man 3 maintains the franchise’s greatest strength. Even with all the fussing about and piling on, the characters show a capacity for recognizably human emotion and conflict that you don’t find in many superhero movies. But we’ve come to expect such nuance from this franchise, and when it’s submerged beneath the more-bigger mandate, impatience quickly follows. Spider-Man 3 could have shed one new character from its roster and at least 30 minutes from its running time and been no worse for the wear.

A Spider-Man 4 is a near certainty; money-printing machines of this magnitude aren’t shut off so easily. But it might be time to pull a Batman Begins and start from scratch. Spider-Man 3 isn’t bad enough to be the death knell of a successful franchise, but just think how novel it would be to tear up the blueprints before the decline grows steep. That would be a heroic act of both power and responsibility.

Published in The Dallas Morning News: 05.04.07

Retrieved from http://www.guidelive.com/portal/page?_pageid=33,97283&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL&item_id=54785 on May 17, 2007.

Spider-Man 3 Review - FilmBlather

2007-05-17T09:00:00.000-07:00

"Everybody needs help sometimes, Peter. Even Spider-Man."

As I write this on Friday morning, a consensus has formed that Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3 is vastly inferior to its two predecessors. A litany of complaints is being levied against it: it's poorly paced and disorganized; full of plot holes and sundry implausibilities; so busy and with so many villains and conflicts that nothing gets enough play. These criticisms are being made in reviews the world over, and they're mostly uncomplicated and correct; you won't have to look too hard to find a writer who goes through them in detail. Though I largely agree with what's being said, I don't think I have very much to contribute to this part of the discourse, except to affirm that a lot of what you're hearing is actually true.

So instead, I'm going to tell you what I liked about Spider-Man 3, because for all its problems and miscalculations, the film is fascinating and gutsy in its sheer strangeness. Sam Raimi, manifestly not content with the emerging superhero formula, spends 140 minutes flailing around, trying all sorts of weird and different things. And though not all of them work, surely there must be something to a movie so willing to venture off the beaten trail.

I liked the film's absolute dedication to its characters. There are really no stakes here beyond Peter Parker and his relationships with girlfriend Mary Jane Watson and friend-turned-mortal-enemy Harry Osborne, and while this would ordinarily be a demerit for a $250 million comic book extravaganza, it works here because Raimi (who co-wrote as well as directed) is so invested in this stuff. It's heartbreaking how Peter is so deeply in love with MJ, and thinks this so obvious, that he's oblivious to the ways that his actions are hurting her. It's wonderful how patient the film is, how willing to talk, to leave room to breathe, to allow individual moments to transcend the confines of the story. And it's interesting how every action scene -- and there are plenty, though they come sporadically -- has a hook in the characters' psyches rather than just in the mechanics of the plot.

I liked the way Raimi mixes endearing comic book goofiness with earnest gravitas. Some have called Spider-Man 3 a soap opera, and that's not entirely inaccurate: people cry and rage and occasionally launch into soliloquy. Others have called it self-important, but that just seems like an uncharitable way of saying that it thinks its story is serious business, and that, it seems to me, is healthy. But just as you think the movie might start to collapse under its own weight, Raimi launches into what must be the funniest five minutes of the year: think the second film's "Spider-Man No More" montage, only on crack. What's more, Raimi deploys this in service of the film's most "serious" aspect -- the emergence of Spidey's dark side -- thereby giving it the maximum possible undercutting effect. It's a ballsy move (the midnight audience I saw the film with seemed almost too stunned to laugh), but somehow it's right: the first two films skillfully infused crucial emotional beats with humor, and this, too, isn't mere frivolity. It's funny, but it functions as an important bit of emotional groundwork -- which also goes for a hilarious cameo by Bruce Campbell as a French maitre'd.

I liked how the movie, for all its idiosyncrasies, seems to have brought out the best in the actors. Kirsten Dunst has never been better -- MJ spends most of the film frustrated or annoyed, which sounds like a thankless part, but Dunst turns it to her advantage: the more exasperated MJ gets, the more desirable she seems to become. Tobey Maguire takes the film's mood swings in stride, retaining the gee-whiz quality that has made him a hit in the role while adding a convincing mean streak. And James Franco delivers on the promise he showed in the first two films by nearly running away with the film: Harry begins as a terrific supervillain, undergoes an amnesiac transformation into a sweetheart and Peter's best buddy, then does another about-face before resolving in a way I won't reveal. It's a fantastic, difficult performance.

Obviously I've underplayed the film's problems, and make no mistake: as a follow-up to what I consider the finest superhero films ever made, Spider-Man 3 is a major disappointment. But many of the responses to it have been disappointing as well. Some people can't get past the admittedly shoddy treatment of the two new villains; others seem to be getting hung up on plot holes and inconsistencies. But with a film that does as many interesting things with the genre and the story as this one does, I feel like we can be having a more interesting discussion than the one that seems to be dominating the internet. Spider-Man 3 may not be transcendent, but it's food for thought.

--Eugene Novikov

Retrieved from http://www.filmblather.com/review.php?n=spiderman3 on May 17, 2007.

Spider-Man 3 Review - BBC

2007-05-17T08:58:00.000-07:00

Your 'friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man' swings back into town a little less friendly than before in the third instalment of Sam Raimi's cracking comic-book franchise. An extra-terrestrial parasite is to blame as it seeps between the fibres of Spidey's skin-hugging bodysuit and draws out his darker side. Once again Tobey Maguire is pitch perfect as the web-slinging geek, actually rousing sympathy and getting big laughs, looking like Adolf Hitler meets 70s hipster.

Especially unimpressed with Peter Parker's metamorphosis is girlfriend MJ (Kirsten Dunst), who seeks solace in ex Harry Osborn (James Franco). Of course Harry's got his own 'issues' with Parker, although he temporarily forgets to avenge dad's death after a knock on the noggin. Playing the amnesia card is a little desperate on the writers' part, but there are other more grating coincidences that hold together a very complicated plot, eg, the emergence of Sandman (Thomas Haden Church) and, in particular, his history with Parker.

Nonetheless, Sandman is a truly fearsome villain, stunningly realised in CGI. His human side offers sharp contrast, echoing Spidey's own 'family vs. duty' dilemma. Similarly, Topher Grace, playing a rival press photographer and Sandman's cohort Venom, forces Parker to face up to Harry (who inevitably recovers his memory).

"AWESOME AEROBATICS AND SHREWD MOMENTS OF COMEDY"

It's this emotional push-and-pull that raises the stakes, prompting a sharper intake of breath as Spidey goes swinging into action. And there's plenty of that - awesome aerobatic battles, each one topping the last. Shrewd moments of comedy bring our hero crashing back to earth, like a wickedly funny scene where he channels John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever! Despite a few knots in the story, that trademark combo of warmth, wit and charm keeps you hanging.

Spider-Man 3 is released in UK cinemas on Friday 4th May 2007.

Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2007/04/30/spider_man_3_2007_review.shtml on May 17, 2007

Spider-Man 3 Reveiw - San Fransico Chronicle

2007-05-17T08:56:00.000-07:00

If the first "Spider-Man" had a script as weak and muddled as the one for "Spider-Man 3," it's hard to believe it ever would have been made. But with the series a worldwide success -- and especially coming off "Spider-Man 2," which was superb -- the filmmakers can afford a weak entry without having to worry about being punished. The only ones who'll be punished are audiences.
"Spider-Man 2" was a textbook example of how to make a sequel: Deepen it, make it funnier, give it more heart and come up with a strong villain and a good story. "Spider Man 3," by contrast, shows how not to make a sequel. The film takes three bad stories and tries to fashion a narrative out of them. It can't be done. It also takes established and warmly regarded characters and has them behave in ways that make no sense in terms of what we know about them. And, perhaps to give the movie the illusion of scale, it contains many empty conversations -- scenes in which characters dither and nothing happens. Word to the wise: Whenever Rosemary Harris shows up as Peter Parker's beloved old aunt, it's safe to run out and get popcorn.

Even the special effects take a step backward. Body movements are awkward. The elastic springing of Spider-Man as he vaults and swings from the tops of buildings looks unnatural, too often like something on a computer screen. The effect isn't helped by director Sam Raimi's choice to film a lot of the hand-to-hand combat in close-ups in quick cuts, which sometimes makes it difficult to track what's going on.

Little imprecisions in the effects wouldn't matter if the other aspects of the film were working. But "Spider-Man 3" screws up even some of the more reliable elements, most notably the relationship between Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) and his girlfriend, Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst). Things start well. Mary Jane has a singing part in a Broadway show, and Peter goes to see her. The reviews are awful, and that's a potentially interesting and satisfying direction: Dunst, who does her own singing, really does sound amateurish. But the movie doesn't build from that in a coherent way.

The script hints that maybe being Spider-Man is going to Peter Parker's head, but it doesn't commit to that course. It suggests that maybe Mary Jane is becoming jealous of Peter's success, but it doesn't follow through on that, either. It just keeps feinting in various directions, and in the process it distorts Peter and Mary Jane's relationship. At times, the plotting is so flimsy that it rolls out the oldest and least forgivable trick in the book: It depends on Peter and Mary Jane's not talking when they most certainly would, not telling each other things they definitely would say. That's just cheap, and it betrays these characters who've been lovingly built over the course of two features.

Three stories are set in motion in the movie's first minutes: (1) Harry Osborn (James Franco), Peter's old friend, decides to follow in his Goblin father's footsteps, and becomes Spider-Man's nemesis; (2) The criminal (Thomas Haden Church) who killed Peter's saintly uncle (Cliff Robertson) is transformed, through a process of disintegration and reintegration, into an unkillable Sandman; and (3) An alien substance -- black and elastic -- comes to earth in a meteorite and finds its way to Peter's apartment.

It's all marginally interesting, but there's one thing missing: a real villain. Harry Osborn is a confused young man, not the essence of evil, and Sandman, though a destructive force, is as mournful as Lon Chaney Jr.'s Wolfman. He's not a driven adversary. He's more like a sad mope.

The most promising plot element is the black elastic substance, which attaches itself to the body as a second skin and emphasizes whatever latent, dark traits its wearer might have. But Raimi and his associates let that element lie dormant for almost half the movie's running time, when a good story might have been fashioned from that concept alone. Epics are made from stories that demand the epic treatment. A story has a certain scale and grandeur, and the act of doing justice to it results in an epic. That's the right way to do it.

The wrong way is to decide you want to make a big movie and then, without much to say, you proceed to throw every possible idea at the screen in the hope it'll work out. That's what Raimi does in "Spider-Man 3," which is so clumsy that at times one can sense the filmmaker artificially slowing down one story in order to pursue another. Maguire and Dunst are appealing as always, even though they'd be better off with stronger material.

Actually, the whole world of the "Spider-Man" films is appealing, which is what saves this entry from disaster. At 140 minutes, it's not a difficult movie to sit through. It's just difficult to enjoy.

-- Advisory: Intense action violence.

E-mail Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/03/DDGE7PJ9TN1.DTL

This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Spider-Man 3 Review - Reelviews

2007-05-17T08:53:00.000-07:00

A Film Review by James Berardinelli
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Spider-Man series, which debuted in 2002 and continued in 2004 and 2007, represents the first superhero cycle to complete a trilogy with the same primary cast and production team it had at the beginning. If nothing else, that assures viewers of a certain degree of continuity. However, while it could be argued that Spider-Man 2 had too little plot for its substantial running length, the opposite could be said of Spider-Man 3. It's really two movies crammed into one, the first of which is a lot better than the second. Spider-Man 3 starts out strong but before it finishes, many viewers will desperately wish it had called it quits an hour earlier.

One has to consider that the film's problems - and they are numerous - may be the product of the franchise's runaway popularity. In each of the first two films, director Sam Raimi was careful to limit the villain count to one (unless one counts Daily Bugle editor J. Jonah Jameson, brilliantly played by J.K. Simmons). Here, it triples, and the focus on the bad guys limits the amount of time we have for the soap opera that is Peter Parker's life. Expectations for this movie were sky-high and one wonders whether the pressure to fulfill them caused the director to overreach his grasp and miss the point that bigger and louder do not always equate to better.

When the film opens, things couldn't be rosier for Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire). His alter-ego, Spider-Man, is a beloved icon. His girlfriend, Mary-Jane (Kirsten Dunst), is making her Broadway debut. And he's getting straight A's in college. The only downside is that his former best friend, Harry Osborn (James Franco), continues to harbor a grudge. Harry has discovered his dad's secret storage space full of bombs and body-changing chemicals and he uses those to pursue his goal of offing Spider-Man. Meanwhile, Harry isn't the only bad guy Peter will have to face. Flint Marko (Thomas Haden Church), the con who killed Uncle Ben, has escaped from prison and fled into a forbidden testing zone where radiation turns him into a creature made from living sand. And a parasitic creature from outer space called Venom has infected Spidey's suit, enhancing his powers and aggression any time Peter wears it. Venom eventually makes its way into the body of Eddie Brock (Topher Grace), a photographer with a grudge against Peter.

The film's setup is effective and feels like a continuation of the previous Spider-Man stories. The most kinetic action scene is the first one, as Harry and Peter tussle through the streets of New York. Although Sandman's introduction is lame, Thomas Haden Church plays the character so movingly that might have been possible to ignore this plot device if it was the only weak one in the movie (which it isn't). The most glaring stumbling block is Venom. He's one bad guy too many. Not only is the creature poorly realized but its introduction into the story causes everything to be crowded, rushed, and overlong. Spider-Man 3 feels like it should end around the 1:40 mark, but like the Energizer Bunny on a rampage, it keeps going.

The climactic battle is a disaster. It's not exciting and it requires two contrivances too excruciating to ignore (one involves a butler that would make Alfred look dumb; the other involves Sandman's eventual fate). It's unforgivable that the film's last action scene should be so vastly inferior to the first one. The special effects aren't even all that impressive. There are several instances in which it's all-too-obvious that Spider-Man and his nemeses are computer generated. This is sloppier than anything in either Spider-Man or Spider-Man 2.

To a large extent, the movie seems like a regurgitation of motifs and ideas from its predecessors. The Mary Jane/Peter/Harry love triangle is back and it spends much of the movie spinning its wheels (although I will admit that the scene on the bridge is heartbreaking). Peter once again must battle his inner demons and bemoan how he handled Uncle Ben's death. Mary Jane gets to bait the hook for a third time and ends up re-playing the damsel in distress role. The fight scenes feel like they take a little from the first movie, a little from the second, and mix them together. They're more formulaic than exhilarating, and there's nothing in Spider-Man 3 that comes close to the train sequence from Spider-Man 2.

There are also unnecessary characters. I guess Gwen Stacy (Bryce Dallas Howard) has been added as a nod to comic book fans, but she serves no purpose other than to make us wonder whether Mary Jane is still an interesting character. Her father (James Cromwell) is equally underused. Bruce Campbell gets a nice extended cameo, but why do his scenes seem like Monty Python outtakes? And, as I have already mentioned, everything about Venom is a mistake. At the very least this villain deserved its own movie rather than being awkwardly shoehorned into a film that starts out being about Peter, Harry, and Sandman.

Audience reaction to the film at the midnight opening screening was negative, bordering on hostile, meaning that the core group of fans did not like what they were seeing. It's easy to understand their displeasure. Compared to the other two movies in the series, this one is a misfire. It's for completists only, and even they are likely to feel let down. Spider-Man and the first sequel were breezy adventures - easy and fun to sit through. Spider-Man 3 is a chore. The effective moments require a lot patience to uncover and some of what has to be shifted to get to them is not worth the effort. People love trilogies because it's said that good things come in threes, but this series would have looked better and felt more satisfying had the filmmakers stopped at two.

© 2007 James Berardinelli

Retrieved from http://www.reelviews.net/movies/s/spider-man3.html on May 17, 2007

2007-05-01T08:15:00.000-07:00

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