Maybe it's me. I'll admit my prejudices. For someone like myself, who gained literacy partially via comic books in the mid-'60s, the saga of Spider-Man was always the saga of the nerd superhero Peter Parker's competing affections for Mary Jane Watson and Gwen Stacy. That is, hot, flirty, unreliable MJ versus steadfast, true, yet strangely enough equally hot Gwen, whose strangely equal hotness was not-so-strangely circumscribed by the fact that she was the daughter of the New York City chief of police.
So maybe for guys like me the cinematic Spider-Man franchise was doomed from the start, in that it made the Mary Jane Watson character a "good girl" from the start. Huh? And here, in Spider-Man 3, Gwen Stacy is introduced not as a paragon of virtue but as a variety of temptress. Again: Huh? What's even more unfortunate is that, as portrayed by the profoundly miscast Bryce Dallas Howard, she doesn't register as a temptress. Actually, as written by Alvin Sargent and Ivan Raimi, she doesn't register as much of anything at all.
And here we get closer to the problems with Spider-Man 3 that are more likely to count with its larger audience, an audience which isn't so married to the vision of the comic book in its '60s heyday. Spider-Man 3 is, like its predecessors, faithful to the spirit of that comic book in that it's something of a male soap opera enlivened by bouts of superhero action. Peter Parker, once beset by all the problems of Harold Teen, is here growing further into young adulthood. His relationship with his girlfriend, Mary Jane, is challenged by MJ's own insecurities concerning her stalling acting career, and by the introduction of Gwen Stacy. His best friend Harry Osborn is also pursuing MJ, and a young hotshot photog named Eddie Brock is challenging Peter's freelance photog status over at The Daily Bugle. It's enough to make any single young male in Manhattan's head spin in and of itself. But then there's the fact that Parker is also the web-swinging superhero Spider-Man.
Harry's got the potential to reincarnate the supervillain created by his late father, The Green Goblin. One of the petty criminals who was involved in the death of Peter's beloved Uncle Ben becomes the hard-to-hit, harder-to-hold supervillain The Sandman. And some black gunk from outer space gets hold of Parker and transforms him into a kind of goth version of Spidey who challenges the superhero's ultra-good-guy status. The gunk then finds its way onto Brock, changing him into... yes, another supervillain, this one named Venom.
Sweet mother of mercy, that's a helluva lot of plot for a single movie, and it's to director Sam Raimi and cowriters Alvin Sargent and Ivan Raimi's credit that they keep it percolating and for the most part comprehensible for its 140-minute running time. But so much of the stuff in this very involved saga goes past in a roller-coaster rush. The characters' problems hence seem to exist only in order to push the plot along rather than create any emotional involvement for the audience.
Then there's the wimp factor. The Spider-Man-battles-himself material is pretty bland, with Parker mostly just forgetting his manners and doing his hair as if he's auditioning for an emo band or something. The resolution of the Sandman plotline is larded with bromides about forgiveness that make the '60s comic book's liberal panaceas look positively tough-minded. And so on.
Still, there are those spectacular action set pieces, and a cast that's consistently appealing or better. But this incarnation of Spider Man seems to forget that its source material was a comic book that wanted to transcend its genre. This is a movie that's content to be pretty good within its genre, with the main distinction of being much bigger than any of its competition.
