When I first heard that the latest installment of the Spider-Man movie series would be featuring not one, not two, but three villains, I had reservations… huge reservations. The last time we saw a trio of costumed bad guys in a superhero movie it was Bane, Mr. Freeze and Poison Ivy in Batman and Robin, and we all know how that ended: Joel Schumacher condemned to life as a punch line and Batman denied another feature for nearly a decade… and it gave Marvel the opening it needed to take over the comics-to-movies market with a string of mid-to-high quality features in the 10 years since. One of the keys to that dominance of course is the Spider-Man series. Now, will the third installment’s breaking of the “no more than two villains per hero” rule lead to a similar fate for the Big M? Let’s find out…
Taking into consideration you’ve probably seen the first two movies at this point (and if you haven’t, Three’s opening credits will treat you to a recap), allow me to catch you up on our buddies from movies past: Spider-Man has become the hero of New York City, accepted and loved by millions and celebrated on every newsstand you can find. The hype is going to Peter Parker’s head though, and as such he’s becoming a self-centered douche bag with his head up his ass and is ignoring the personal problems of his lady love, Mary Jane. MJ starts off strong with the lead in a Broadway show, but starts to spiral rather quickly upon being panned by the critics, and every time she looks to Pete for a shoulder to cry on he’s too busy sucking his own dick to notice. As for Harry Osborn, he’s still obsessed with avenging his daddy’s death by killing Spider-Man… who he just found out in our last sequel is really Peter Parker, his long-time school chum. To do this avenging, Harry has taken up daddy Norman’s hobby of creating high-tech weapons of death with which to kill people in spectacular fashion! Only, to give his gimmick that “it’s hip, it’s now, it’s wow and how!” flavor, he’s dropped the Jet Jaguar helmet in favor of a paintball mask, turned the costume into more of a “covert ops” type thing instead of a green bodysuit, and replaced the big metal batwing glider sled with the world’s deadliest snowboard… yeah, I shit all over it at first too… and still wasn’t all that happy with it by the end… meh. As for Aunt May, well, she’s still around there somewhere, popping in on occasion to hand out nuggets of homespun wisdom and crap. Norman Osborn’s still dead with the exception of jumping into Harry’s hallucinations here and there. Peter’s landlord still wants his rent, his daughter Ursula’s still adorable in that “awkward skinny Russian girl” way, Uncle Ben and Otto Octavius are still pushing up daisies, and Curt Connors only has one arm. Now for the new guys!
Flint Marko is a convict on the run from the law. He’s escaped prison (where he was put for his part in stealing money to fund an operation for his dying daughter) and may have had a part in the unfortunate murder of a certain elderly man who was driving a 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88 at the time of his death. Mr. Marko winds up getting the Bruce Banner treatment when he’s trapped in the sights of a “should have been aborted when they knew something was wrong” science experiment and gets turned into the walking, talking incarnation of Blood Beach… only without the flesh eating alien thing. As the Sandman, Flint can increase his mass by absorbing fine particulates like dirt, concrete and more sand, but might want to stay away from clogged toilets and open fire hydrants. Gwen Stacy is Pete’s college Physics lab partner and the daughter of a police captain. She’s rescued by Spidey during an intense disaster sequence (seriously, edge of the seat stuff there) and has a tendency to show up at the worst possible times for poor Peter. Speaking of Gwen, she’s the object of affection for “Edward Brock Junior”. Eddie is the new guy in town who’s a (funhouse) mirror character of Peter and is gunning for a certain photographer’s job at the Daily Bugle. This quickly goes south for him though when he pisses off the wall crawler and gets bounced from his place of business as a result, leading him to seek solace in a church, but instead of finding salvation in the mercenary arms of Jesus “Gun for Hire” Christ, the potential for retribution comes in his new alias as the fanged Spidey foil known as Venom, whose gaping grin gives the Joker a run for his Monopoly money. How does he become Venom? Eddie gets a hold of some of the wall crawler’s hand-me-downs, also known as our final new character: the alien symbiote.
The alien symbiote is a sentient puddle of black goo that crash lands to Earth via a meteorite (ala Slither) that just so happens, despite the approximate 197 million other square miles of the planet’s surface, to land not too far from where Pete and MJ are making out (notice you can’t see what her left hand’s doing… probably working her man’s “web shooter” if you know what I mean and I think you do) in an oversized novelty spider web: it’s nature’s hammock! The ink puddle hops a ride on our hero’s busted down scooter (a visual gag that kept the audience in stitches every time the broken down putter was shown on screen) and lurks about his apartment, waiting for the right time to strike and bond with Peter, feeding on his anger, depression and engorged ego from the events of the movie: relationship trouble with MJ, the hungry eyes of Gwen Stacy, the blind consumer love of millions, and learning of Flint Marko’s influence on his own life. The symbiote bonds with the hero’s suit, turning it black and making Spidey stronger, faster and a lot less concerned with all those “moral limitations” he puts on himself. As for Peter, it convinces him to “emo out” like Chris fucking Gaines, transforms his personality into that of John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever (oh yes, strut and disco dancing included!), and gives the boy a “saucy” jazz club routine like you ain’t never seen! Yes, yes, it’s all quite comical… until our man has to break out a different black suit for the final scene… a suit he got very familiar with twice in the first movie...
The thrills and chills for this installment have been ramped up considerably. The number of “daredevil” aerial stunts (if you can call CGI “stunts”) is exponential as Spidey and the new Goblin trade fists a number of times (the first occurrence of which is a bit too “frantic” to translate well for watching on a big screen), Spidey struggles through a run-amuck crane accident and the subsequent falling debris that results, and the big final showdown takes place in the classic “unfinished skyscraper” motif that Raimi loved so much while shooting Darkman, he decided to bring it back into style! The acting is pretty good. Tobey Maguire is still the best Peter Parker we’ll ever see (though, as Zodiac taught us, should Tobey look his gift horse in the mouth, Jake Gyllenhaal will be more than adequate as a Parker replacement…), James Franco is a good asshole as always, Kirsten Dunst still can’t seem to rise above here apparent training from the Jennifer Lopez School of Hammy Whimpering and Making Stupid Faces, Topher Grace was good as a the irritating heel up until he tried to become pure evil as Venom (at which point I fear he may never be able to shed his Eric Foreman good guy image), Thomas Haden Church could’ve used a little more intensity in his part (it’s hard to convince people you’re innocent when you don’t seem all that determined to make people believe you), Bryce Dallas Howard was actually great as Gwen (something I’m breaking an oath over never saying a positive thing about Ron Howard’s offspring just to type), I can’t get enough of JK Simmons as Triple J (I was disappointed to see his part show up so late to the show), and for all the Bruce Campbell fans: the man gets more screen time here than in the first two movies combined and he fucking runs away with it. He’s still the man and needs to be cast in the next big Hollywood buddy movie… as long as it’s not alongside Adam Sandler, Chris Tucker or ones of those ass bags from “Friends”. Why are they still breathing!?
The story is a bit jumbled and may leave a number of people a little disheveled at times, expected to follow the individual stories of a cast of no less than 6 different major members and a handful of supporters. If love-hate triangles makes your head hurt, this spandex clad hexagonal equivalent might give you a violent case of the spins. Sandman takes the cake for “wow” factor (watching his become a living sandstorm floating menacingly through the streets of Manhattan is oddly awe inspiring in it’s scope alone) and Harry Goblin (heh heh, “hairy goblin”) really gets much of the focus, including a bizarrely comical twist in his tale that you’d only expect to see in a bad soap opera, a cartoon, or… here it comes… a comic book. I felt that, despite all the hype surrounding Venom, the villain is so tardy coming to class that he should’ve just been marked absent and pushed back for the fourth movie. Or, had anyone had a little foresight, perhaps ol’ Eddie Brock should’ve been fleshed out sometime during the second film instead of trying to throw him in with a new bad guy, a romantic rival and an already established ne’er-do-well? I dug the CGI work, on Venom and Sandman especially, and it warms the heart to see much effort put into making it happen. Raimi’s direction was great, but you can’t expect anything less from the man. Now, if only he could stop making some of the fight scenes look like he’d directed them while on speedballs and Pixie Sticks, everything would be right in the world. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll cheer, you’ll gasp and you’ll be asking for more… unless you just hate having fun, in which case I recommend you instead attend a festival of depressing black & white “art” movies about gay cowboys eating pudding and finding love in the blood soaked trenches of World War I (“World War II’s been so poseur and sell-out since Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan”).
