The first few moments of Spider-Man 3 flow gracefully—no scene feels too fast or too slow. But as soon as the machinery of the plot starts grinding away, piling on more characters, themes, and psychological baggage, the drama becomes increasingly cumbersome. Director Sam Raimi can’t seem to hold on to any one idea for very long, so he ploughs through a whole basketful of them in the hope that something will stick. When the film’s 140 minutes have run their course, you might feel tired, wrung out, and a little confused.

When we last left Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire), he was trying like gangbusters to live up to his reputation as Spidey while remaining true to his two best friends, Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) and Harry (James Franco). Not an easy balance to strike. But by this time he seems to have finally worked out an agreeable system, and all is hunky-dory until an extraterrestrial parasite with seductive powers turns him temporarily into… John Travolta. Yes, this alien “symbiote,” an agile glop of pitch-dark jelly, attaches itself to poor Peter, causing him to wear black, comb down his hair, and strut along the sidewalk like a disco stud. I couldn’t tell whether the audience laughter provoked during these scenes was brought on by delight or embarrassment. (A little of both, maybe?)



Meanwhile, Mary Jane gets ticked at Peter for flirting with his nubile lab partner Gwen Stacy (Bryce Dallas Howard). Harry broods in his lonely mansion like a junior Bruce Wayne, dreaming of avenging his father’s death. And Flint Marko (Thomas Hayden Church), an escaped convict whose molecular structure got crossed with that of sand, rampages across New York as Sandman, occasionally swelling to Kong-ish proportions. And Peter finds out who really killed Uncle Ben. And freelance cameraman Eddie Brock (Topher Grace) develops a grudge against Peter for blowing the whistle on his fraudulent photos. And Peter learns that it’s choices that ultimately make us who we are.

There are so many “ands” to this installment that the film feels frenzied, almost chaotic, compared to the cool, measured tones of its immediate predecessor, Spider-Man 2 (the high point of the series, hands down). What’s more, the villains aren’t nearly nuanced enough for a franchise that prides itself on strong characterization. Give a character a slapdash back story (Sandman, we learn early on, robs banks in order to pay his daughter’s medical bills), introduce a case of retrograde amnesia (that old chestnut), toss in a few instances of ham-fisted symbolism, and this is supposed to pass for complexity? And this, from the writer of Ordinary People? (Alvin Sargent penned the script with Ivan Raimi, the director’s older brother.) Did they forget that what made the first and second films so compelling (and, in the case of Spider-Man 2, so affecting) was their clarity of purpose?



The manifold plot threads converge, rather hysterically, during a climactic battle between good and evil, and with a few more deaths than expected. There might be some tears shed on behalf of these fatalities, provided you haven’t already been desensitized by the earsplitting, over-scaled, blurrily photographed action sequences. (There is nothing here, action-wise, to compare with the el-train scene from Spider-Man 2.)



Still, Sandman looks suitably menacing in his striped shirt and crew cut. The creature known as Venom (created when the black alien goo attaches itself to Eddie) has a few choice moments creeping around buildings and flashing a mean set of razor-sharp teeth. And the concluding scene, uniting its three main characters with a setting sun, manages to pull off a rudimentary example of poetry, or at least something like it. If this truly marks the conclusion of the colossally popular superhero series (and there’s no real reason to believe it will), Raimi at least found a sanguine image to end on.