Spider-Man 3
Click on the link below to listen to my review of “Spider-Man 3″ on the WTMD Morning Show. (89.7 FM, Towson, Md.)
LISTEN: Spider-Man 3
To our discussion I will add: I liked Topher Grace as Eddie Brock, Peter Parker’s sleazy rival photographer at the Daily Bugle. Grace has a sprightliness, a sense of fun, that you rarely see out of Tobey Maguire. But what really stuck in my craw about this movie was the lazy screenplay (credited to director Sam Raimi, his brother Ivan and Alvin Sargent). Beyond what I mentioned on-air — the lame dialogue between Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson and the use of amnesia as a cheap, water-treading plot device — we have black sticky goo falling from space and attaching itself to Spider-Man’s suit. (I don’t care, fanboys, if this is how it happened in the comics! If you’re making a $300 million movie you should come up with something better!) That’s not all. There’s also a scene, astonishing for its ineptitude, in which a butler explains to Harry Osborn everything that he didn’t know about Spider-Man and his father. The butler did it! And during the climactic fight sequence, we get scorekeeping narration from a TV news anchor, filling people in on the difference between Venom and the black-suited Spider-Man.
A final, emblematic symbol of the huge waste of resources that went into this movie: Kirsten Dunst again dyes her hair red to play MJ. Meantime, Bryce Dallas Howard, a natural redhead, wears a blond fright wig to play MJ’s romantic rival, muting her luminous, ethereal beauty. Here’s a thought: MJ is an actress. Couldn’t she have gone blond for a role? That way Peter could be smitten by a real redhead, upping the romantic intrigue and potential for jealousy.
Plus, not only is the movie crammed with villains who never seem to die, but it doesn’t know what to do with them. Everybody has a backstory and an arc, but they have no ambition beyond: Get Spider-Man. Sandman, a.k.a. Flint Marko, doesn’t even want to do that. He just wants to rob banks to finance medical treatment for his terminally ill daughter. (We’re introduced to her, and to Marko’s wife, in a single, throwaway scene, and as far as we know, at the end of the movie the girl is still sick.) Another throwaway comes when Venom and Sandman join forces, for no other reason than they both want to wipe out Spidey. The people of New York, whom Spider-Man has sworn to protect, get a pass in this movie, because the bad guys aren’t interested in doing harm to the citizenry. They’re obsessed with Spider-Man. The moviemakers are obsessed with Spider-Man. Spider-Man, for a time, is obsessed with himself. The whole thing is circular, indulgent, maddening. I can only surmise that Raimi, who was showered with box-office receipts and critical acclaim for the first two installments, began to think he could do no wrong and, given a blank check by Sony, went off the rails. “Spider-Man 3″ is a lumbering, out-of-control behemoth.