thedavidlady

Mainstream critics were merciless in their lambasting of this third entry in the Toby Maguire SPIDER-MAN series, but while their complaints were mostly legitimate, the movie on the whole is an entertaining, mostly satisfying and occasionally breathtaking adventure that should please hardcore fans. The ill-advised decision to squeeze three (or, depending on how one looks at it, four) storylines into one feature means that things have to keep moving along at crazy speed, often at the expense of clear explanations for exactly what's going on. The complex plot hinges on the audience's acceptance of a number of huge coincidences all taking place in the same city within the space of a few days. But in the case of Peter Parker and his wall-crawling alterego, a character whose life has always been frought with unlikely situations, the endless procession of far-fetched events and instances of hard-to-believe timing eventually feels less like a writer's convenience than an indication that Parker is trapped in a neverending larger-than-life cosmic test of character engineered by fate itself. As in the first two films, the acting is uniformly outstanding, including that of important returning characters like dear old Aunt May and perpetually and delightfully angry J. Jonah Jameson. Thomas Haden Church is nothing short of wonderful as Sandman, a supervillain who has more complexity here than he was given in the comics. (One of the many things about this series that impressed me is the perfection in the casting of the villains and other supporting characters, who all look and act much more like their comic book inspirations than those in the BATMAN or SUPERMAN films.) It's true that our hero's Spidey-Sense seems inexplicably shut off in this sequel, which sees him sucker-punched several times and frequently unaware of enormous, dangerous anomalies nearby, but Maguire and the rest of the cast are so good that it's easy to overlook the plot holes and roll with the emotionally charged action. The bloblike alien entity that becomes "Venom" is the main visual attraction, although it (and the Sandman) are given almost nothing in the way of explanations. The black space glop simply crawls out of a crashed meteor and Church is turned into a morphing mound of living sand by an unspecified scientific experiment that somehow goes wrong, which allowed for some amazing special effects sequences but bothered many viewers who wanted at least a little discussion of the science fiction concepts behind these bizarre situations. But SPIDER-MAN 3 elects to relegate the pseudoscience to the background so that it can focus on more emotional material. At its heart a story about the crucial role of forgiveness in the lives of all human beings, the script deals with various characters' attempts to sort out the difference between justice and revenge, between fair play and personal vendettas, and their (and everyone's) accountability for the choices one makes in life. The CGI imagery isn't up to the level of that in the previous movie, and in fact much of the large-scale action involving crumbling skyscrapers and other disasters looks surprisingly phony, like watching weightless cartoon figures being flung around on a video game screen instead of seeing real people in real danger. Spider-Man appears more physically invulnerable than ever before, able to take prolonged terrible beatings without even registering any noticeable pain. But on the filmmakers' behalf, it should be noted that the fight scenes were never the most interesting or accessible aspects of Spider-Man anyway. He's much stronger and more resilient than an ordinary person, and while I don't know exactly what it feels like to him when he gets thrown through a brick wall, I can identify with his very human moments of humiliation, isolation and heartbreak, which are all very well handled here. Thus the character retains his capacity for feeling and gives the audience a hero to whom they can relate. It isn't as good a movie as the incredible SPIDER-MAN 2, but fans of the comics and the first two films owe it to themsleves to see this remarkably complex, risk-taking and ambitious work from director Raimi. Sadly it was the end of the series, as this installment was followed by assorted lame and unnecessary remakes, reboots, cartoons and generally soulless and obvious Hollywood cash-grabs. Look at SPIDER-MAN 3 fairly and I think you'll agree that the good here far outweighs the bad.