The Third "Man"

This week, I caught up from the weekend and went to see Spider-man 3. Since I wasn't part of the big opening weekend press, I'd had the chance to hear some feedback on it in advance -- not just the critics who were saying it fell far short of the first two movies, but friends of mine saying different versions of the same thing. Accordingly, I tried to lower my expectations going into the theater.

It wasn't enough.

While I'm not really saying it was a "bad" movie, it's hard to look at it any other way in comparison to the two that came before it. It's harder still to believe it was made by the same people. The first movies both had good stories, emotional and dramatic, and the superhero elements were skillfully layered on top of that. This film had the kernel of an emotional story arc, smothered in too much other "stuff."

One thing's for sure, this film did not need as many villains as it had. I blame Batman for this "villain creep" that seems to occur in superhero movies. And not just the Batman movie sequels, I'm talking about the TV movie Batman made in the 60s with Adam West and Burt Ward. The series, campy and ridiculous though it was, would rotate through bad guys in every pair of episodes, but when the movie came along, it was the Joker and the Penguin and the Riddler and the Catwoman. What the hell? As Shocho put it quite aptly in a discussion earlier this week, in Rocky III, Sylvester Stallone didn't box three people at once.

You could make a reasonable argument as to exactly which of several different characters you think could be stripped from the movie. Sandman gets my vote. He's a completely manufactured villain in every sense of the word. The book was closed on the whole "how Peter's uncle died" thing, but now, out of the blue, it's this other guy -- just so Peter can get on a vengeance kick. And then Sandman doesn't even appear in a large chunk of the movie, because the plot's too busy with other things to hold him.

Then there's Venom. You might argue he was the "point" of the movie, but I say that plot could have been stripped out as well. Venom himself only appears in a couple scenes in the movie (one of them the stereotypically cringe-worthy "one villain approaches the other to take on the hero together" scenes). The whole "black suit" build-up to it is a complete misfire. We're supposed to feel concern that Peter is being corrupted and turned dark, but with few exceptions, every "black suit" moment isn't played to build a sense of dread -- it's played for comedy. We get far more laughs out of seeing Peter's behavior under the black suit's influence (some intentional, but unfortunately, some not) than we get serious moments.

All of this could have been jettisoned to pay off the true emotional throughline that's now been building for several movies: Peter's relationship with Harry. In my opinion, the New Goblin was the only villain this story needed. I just think the writers chickened out, fearing that approach would be rejected because "we'd already seen the Goblin" as the villain in the first film. Well, to continue that Rocky analogy... who did Rocky fight in the second movie? Apollo Creed. Again! As it played out in this movie, the conflict between Harry in Peter is shoved into a corner for the first third of the movie. Harry conveniently gets amnesia, just so the plot can ignore him until all the nonsense with Sandman and Venom gets put into motion.

There are a few scenes and sequences in the movie that are really damn good. The scenes with J.K. Simmons (as J. Jonah Jameson) and Bruce Campbell are outstanding. The "fist fight" between Harry and Peter is great, visceral stuff.

But there are also sequences that fall flat. The first big action scene of the movie, a clash between the New Goblin and Spidey, is a mess. It's "lit" darker than a cheaply made horror movie, and the camera moves so fast through the confined spaces, I honestly could not follow half of what was happening in the scene. And the moment when Harry's butler delivers the big revelation just had me thinking, "this couldn't have come up, oh, a movie-and-a-half ago?" In this one moment, this is how the writers decide to resolve this storyline?

I looked back at how I reviewed Superman Returns, another muddled mess of a superhero movie. I gave that a C, and I can't honestly say I thought this a worse movie. So as harsh as I may be sounding, I'm still going to give Spider-man 3 a C. I just come off strongly against it because I guess despite all the warnings, I was still expecting more from the people that made two good movies before this one. Not just two good superhero movies -- two good movies.

The third time is not the charm.