The Fake Life - Love movies? We do too!

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Review: Spider-Man 3 (Luca's Take)

By Luca Saitta

As a pretty huge Spidey nerd, there was little doubt as to whether or not I’d enjoy this outing. After all, this was from the same creative team as the flawed first and supreme second, right? I am happy to say this fucker does not disappoint. Raimi is a filmmaker at the top of his game, and it shows. Action scenes are kinetic, energetic, hyyyydromatic. They’re just short of greased lightning. The melodrama hits every dirty switch in the book, and it works gloriously.

Maguire is in his element once more as the misunderstood wall-crawler, although the “misunderstood” does not really come into full swing as much as in the second film this time. You could even say that this film is to MJ what Spider-Man 2 was for Spidey himself (if that makes any sense). This makes Dunst less of a dead weight than in the previous films, simply because she actually has something to do in this film besides being arguably pretty and an object for Peter to pine over. Aunt May is preachy as ever, but I liked her in the previous films. There needs to be a moral center, dammit, and this woman and her ghostly spouse fulfill that role with gusto. The Stacys aren’t in this film much at all, but Gwen is pretty and the captain is strict-looking. So there.

Villains, you say? James Franco ups the psycho-ante with his New Goblin, smirking delightfully throughout most of his scenes. Thomas Haden Church is an epically tragic anti-hero. His strangely poetic origin scene and climactic duo-battle with Spidey and some… others... are among the film’s many highlights. His “sick daughter” motivation is melodramatic as balls, but the man sells it. It certainly helps that Church carries his scenes so well, to the point that I totally bought the “real uncle Ben killer” retcon. Like Cillian Murphy in Batman Begins, Topher Grace is creepy before he ever approaches supervillain status. His freaky photographer (alliterations are cool in comic books, okay?) is a welcome change from the misguided Jekyll-and-Hyde types populating the previous two films. As he himself puts it, “I like being bad, Parker. It… makes me happy.”

Some scenes are sure to divide audiences. While the JJJ/Ted Raimi/Campbell bits worked like gangbusters, I heard more than a few groans during Peter’s dance sequence and his admittedly pretty long Tony Manero-style strut. Personally, I really dug these bits. Like 2’s “Raindrops” montage, they show Raimi’s style as much as the Evil Dead-reminiscent Symbiote-Sam-O-Cam shots, and elevate these Spidey flicks above the generic action blockbuster pap audiences are spoon-fed today.

This movie is far from perfect, though. It sometimes relies on some groan-inducing plot devices – especially concerning Harry – to keep the story going where Raimi wants it to go. The plot strands certainly make the film feel very episodic until about halfway through. They’re fun strands, but there’s still a fuckload of them. The film may very well drag near the end for younger viewers, as I saw a lot of them not quite managing to keep quiet after the final fight. Imagine if someone threw the kitchen sink at you, but he was nice enough to glue a bunch of nude pictures of Scarlett Johansson to it. It’s too much, but you can’t really dislike it.