Spider-Man 3 (2007, PG-13)

            Longer, bigger, and louder then before do not mean better for Spider-Man 3, the new comic-book superhero film of the 2007 summer.  It’s the third sequel of the popular franchise, which began pretty well with the first 2002 installment.

Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) is again the protagonist, and is also again secretly the superhero Spiderman, who protects New York from the bad guys.  His life is going good—he’s doing well in school, has a good job, and is ready to propose marriage to his girlfriend; life couldn’t get any better.  Things start to change dramatically when his former best friend, Harry Osborne (James Franco) blames Parker for the death of his father, and, in a fight between the two, Harry suffers from amnesia.  Meanwhile, MJ (Kirsten Dunst), his girlfriend, is starting to have doubts about Peter, and Peter finds out that his uncle’s killer, Flint Marko (Thomas Haden Church) is on the loose.  To add to it, Parker finds a new competitor for the photographer job at the Daily Bugle in Eddie Brock (Topher Grace).  And in addition to it all, a mysterious, alien, black symbiotic turns Spider-Man’s costume black and begins to take a hold on Parker’s life.

 

There are so many plot elements in Spider-Man 3; it could have all come together to make a good movie, but the problem is that it doesn’t come all together, and all stays tangled up in a mess.  There are so many fight and action sequences, subplots, romantic subplots, drama, special effects,  even a cliched script—and it doesn’t all come together nice and even at the end.

            One major problem with Spider-Man 3 is that there are also too many villains: Sandman, the New Goblin and Venom (who is added at the end to make the end battle more exciting)—one villain is plenty!

            Maguire is still good and nerdy and geeky as Parker, but director Sam Raimi really needs to loosen up a bit.  Simply put, he didn’t make as a good a superhero pic as he did before.

            Spider-Man 3 wants so hard to be an engrossing superhero epic; it simply went too far to be epic, and the result is a sometimes entertaining but still mess of a movie.

                                   **/5