Zoom-in Online

We'll get this out of the way at the very start--the visual effects in Spiderman 3 are Awesome. They're certainly the most impressive in the series and show a sophisticated level of inventiveness that are a reminder of just why special effects continue to delight. Director Sam Raimi has come along way from the plasticized slickness of Spiderman's first aerial tours of Manhattan, finally discovering a way to bring the viewer inside the choreography.

What Raimi has also rediscovered is the sense of play that made the first half of the first Spiderman so much fun. Spiderman 3 has some genuine comedy, particularly when Peter Parker dons the black suit and gets in touch with his inner alpha male. Tobey Maguire comes alive like he actually wanted to come to work that day, dancing down the streets and in a jazz club with a marvelously confident physicality. He's Superfly Peter Parker, a creation as compelling (if not more so) as the villains that rise up against him.

This sequence feels like the start of the second act, leading into Peter grappling with the way the black suit relieves him of his pangs of conscience and lets him act like a bad guy--or just like a human being--for a change. Yet this transformation doesn't take place until well over an hour into the film, and by this point the exposition has become numbing to the point of exhaustion. Not to mention the fact that Peter has to get out of the suit before Topher Grace ("That '70s Show") can don it and become Superman's arch-nemesis Venom.
-----
EXTENDED BODY:
There's a whole bunch of conflict between Peter, Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) and Harry Osborn (James Franco) that should've been dealt with in a much more economical fashion so as to get Venom in the picture as soon as possible. He's a fantastically scary villain, and Grace (a continually surprising actor) turns in a fantastic performance, and, in their scenes together, helps Maguire to do the same. It helps that the two green-eyed actors could be brothers.

Contrivances abound in Spiderman 3, with Raimi and co-writers Ivan Raimi and Oscar winner Alvin Sargent dispensing with storytelling finesse altogether in order to get that black goo to fall to earth right next to Peter and Mary Jane's smoochfest in a web. At least when Thomas Haden Church (Sideways) stumbles over a five-foot chain link fence into a "Particle Physics Test Facility" there's a wink/nudge sense to the story. But the deus ex machina goo is just sloppy storytelling. It's just not cool.

Haden Church's lumbering physicality is right for the oafish Sandman, and his birth scene ends up feeling downright poignant as he labors to reunite his sand-fused molecules. But too much of Sandman felt just like the T-1000 from Terminator 2, only grittier. You punch him, your hand goes right through. Knock his head off, and he'll suck the crumbs up into his hand and regrow it. Where is he? Oh, you're standing on him and you better get out of the way before he reforms to kick your ass.

Raimi has lofty intentions of delivering a powerful message about forgiveness, and the way that hating your enemies can eat you alive. If the story structure had been tighter, he might have even elicited tears at the end. But by the time the second final scene rolls around, any tears are going to be tears of exhaustion.

Did I mention that the effects are Awesome?