Spider man 3 - Review

Review in a Hurry: Everyone's favorite friendly neighborhood wall-crawler returns for a titanic battle—against the forces of coincidence and plausibility! M.J. sings, Spidey dances, everybody cries and there's a suitable amount of punching.

The Bigger Picture: Doing whatever a spider can keeps tobey maguire busy in director sam raimi's third outing with the titular Marvel Comics character. Spidey has become a New York celebrity, beloved for his freelance vigilante efforts. Meanwhile, secret identity Peter Parker is on the verge of closing the deal with longtime love object Mary Jane Watson keeping one ear on a police scanner while pursuing a college degree, still taking shots of himself to sell to the Daily Bugle, and boy am I tired just typing that.

Little wonder that when forced to contend with three supervillains and his own inner demons, Parker's overwhelmed.

As will be audiences.

Even at two-plus hours, Spider-Man 3 is stuffed with explosive fistfights (really, explosive!), romantic entanglements, betrayals and reversals, temporary amnesia, and borderline musical numbers. Spider-Man even gets his own heel turn when he's inhabited by an underexplained alien parasite (which just so happens to crash to earth in a city park during an impromptu Parker-Watson makeout session) that turns Parker's Pollyanna-ish personality inside-out.

So much stuff is happening in Spider-Man 3 that contrivances and plot points are literally falling from the sky, which is a stretch even for a film about a man who fights crime with biological Stickum. Previously, Spidey's rivals have been men of science whose reach exceeded their grasp, overcome by baser instincts and the power of their creations. In other words, they made sense.

Here, they're just mooks who happened to stumble into the wrong place at the right time and decided to use their newfound powers for evil.

This is Raimi's none-too-subtle theme, of course: Whatever's thrust upon you, you're still responsible for your actions. And so it's Raimi who's responsible for two films here—one gleefully ludicrous action film and one willfully sentimental melodrama, both concocted by throwing anything he can at a wall. Naturally, it's the Spider that sticks.

The 180—a Second Opinion: If you can walk into Spider-Man 3 and not only suspend your disbelief but surrender it entirely, it's bound to be a thrilling experience, as the set pieces are gorgeous (memo to Bryan Singer: this is what was missing from Superman Returns) and the characters, however cartoonish their origin, nevertheless have an involving depth to them. And however much money this thing ended up costing (estimates range from $200 million to $350-plus million), it's definitely all up there on the screen.