Caught in the Web of Spider Man 3

05.08.07

Step into my parlor, said the bloated blockbuster to the former comic book fan.

Ahh, good old Hollywood arrogance. You've got to love it. The kind of arrogance that assumes it can re-write a classic story and actually improve it in the process.

It has been proven time and time again that screenwriters cannot write better than novelists. Book after book has been butchered and dumbed down by the Hollywood hit factory (i.e. The Three Musketeers, Jurassic Park, and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, among countless others). The resulting films were, as the rule goes, inferior to the books that spawned them. But one would think that a screenwriter could turn a better tale than a COMIC BOOK writer, right?

Wrong.

I did enjoy Spider Man 3. However, it did not live up to the potential of the source material. Maybe this is because my standards are too high. Maybe not.

I'm going to admit it right now: I was a bit of a comic book geek as a kid. I loved Spider Man. He was quite possibly my favorite superhero (though, admittedly, Batman was just as cool). I read the comic books. I watched the cartoons. I identified with the guy. Hell, I even became a photographer, which was Peter Parker's day job. (For the uninitiated, Parker is Spidey's alter ego… or vice versa).

Sadly, the Spider Man of cinema is not the Spider Man of my youth. Tobey Maguire has yet to evolve into the witty, irreverent smart-ass that Spider Man is supposed to be. As dark as they try to make Tobey seem in this film, he still remains a friendly, harmless goof.

Don't get me wrong… Spider Man is supposed to be a friendly goof. But he is also supposed to be a quick-witted class clown, characteristics he still fails to exhibit in Sam Raimi's films.

Nonetheless, the film is a good one. It starts off great, and remains consistently engaging until the climax, at which point it gets a bit ridiculous, a trait from which it never fully recovers. J.K. Simmons does a perfect job reprising his role as J. Jonah Jameson, Peter Parker's boss. Unlike many of the stars, Simmons was perfectly cast for his character. Bryce Dallas Howard is excellent as Gwen Stacey, Spidey's new love interest. She is also quite beautiful. Bruce Cambell, the b-movie hero from Raimi's earlier "Evil Dead" films, has an amusing cameo as a French waiter. Hell, I've even gotten used to Maguire as Spider Man.

But the villains? Please. Like the cheesy Joel Schumacher Batman sequels, Spider Man 3 suffers from having too many antagonists. As a result, none of the characters get a chance to become adequately developed over the course of the story.

The Sandman:
The Sandman is one of the worst villains from the Spider Man comic books, and I mean that in a bad way. He should never have been featured in a film. That said, they did an excellent job forging him into a sympathetic character who resorts to crime as a means to pay for his ailing daughter's treatment. This is probably the only instance in the film where they re-wrote a character and the results were an improvement. The CGI sequence illustrating his rebirth as a supervillain was particularly impressive and strangely moving, and Thomas Hayden-Church maintains his usual likeable pathos even in the midst of his evil doing. However, the film would've been better off if they had scrapped the Sandman character completely and re-cast Hayden-Church as Venom.

The "New" Goblin:
First off, the character is supposed to be the "Green" Goblin. Do the bastards have to change everything? James Franco wears a mask for about two seconds in the movie, leading the viewer to wonder why they even call him a goblin at all. He certainly does not does not seem goblin-esque in the slightest, but rather merely a snowboarding asshole who happens to fly around. I found myself missing Willem Dafoe. Nonetheless, Franco is delightfully villainous at times, and his character is consistently engaging. I just wish they would fire the film's costume designer, who has once again delivered mediocre and unimaginative work.

Venom:
Venom is the best Spider-Man villain of all time in the comic books, and by far the biggest disappointment in the film. Eddie Brock, the man who becomes Venom, is supposed to be a big, burly bully. Topher Grace, in what is clearly the worst casting choice since Hugo Weaving as Elrond in the Lord of the Rings, portrays Brock as a sneaky pipsqueak. It thus makes no sense when Venom's physique dwarfs that of Spider Man, seeing as Grace is more diminutive than Maguire. The computer graphics for Venom are mediocre, and the character design is far inferior to most of Venom's many depictions in print. So many artists have rendered Venom brilliantly; Sam Raimi and his team are not among them. Also, like the "New" Goblin, the Venom character is unmasked for the majority of his screen time. Put the masks back on the villains, people! Maintain some sense of danger and mystery, for the love of God!

A message to filmmakers everywhere: if it ain't broke, don't try to fix it.

Despite my criticisms, I did like this movie. You probably will too… however, if you grew up on Spider Man, like I did, you can't help but feel some sense of frustration and disappointment. Is it really so hard to make a film that remains faithful to the source material? I get the impression that, once again, business is compromising art.

Overall Grade: C+