In a sentence that contains a few words; Spider-Man 3 is too long, too slow and more often than not too caught up in its own cleverness.
Spider-Man is an icon, pure and simple, he represents the everyman among the pantheon of comic book heroes, the uber-nerd who has no respect from anybody, yet when he dons the tights, he becomes a hero. The first movie captured the wonder of the transformation from zero to hero and the second movie anchored the hero into a world where grey is more predominant than black and white.
The third movie attempts to elevate Spider-Man as hero to the masses, where his actions are no longer viewed with suspicion, but rather with respect. It starts off well enough in Spider-Man 3, a less than happy Harry Osborne takes on his late fathers mantle as the Green Goblin and almost beats Spider-Man to a pulp, if not for an ill-placed pipe and a case of amnesia.
Then the race is on to quickly introduce the rest of the cast, Gwen Stacey, Eddie Brock, Captain Stacey, Flint Marko, J Jonah Jamieson, Betty Brant let alone Aunt May, Uncle Ben, Sandman, Venom and Harry’s butler. There’s also a lot of faces from the first two movies and cameos from Stan Lee and others who have worked with director Sam Rami in the past, including a funny, but seriously overlong and unnecessary piece with Bruce Campbell in a posh French restaurant.
You could never accuse Sam Rami of not making the most of his action pieces, they all zing with lots of movement, dazzling camera movement and lots of Spider-Man heroics. He swings, he sways and he spins webs… yeah it’s all a blur of blue and red. When the action dies down though, it starts to get a bit muddled and drawn out, for a start Spider-Man 3 attempts to merge a less than happy mix of humour, pathos, musical numbers and romance, all of which seem beyond the actors to deliver. For not only are the actors struggling, they are also doing this in very tight close ups, in act it seems Samy Rami may have shot the film using two lenses, one for getting overly intimate close ups, the other uses middle distance and not much else. As an aside, I’m not sure if it was the movie itself or the screen I saw it at, but many scenes seemed to be out of focus.
Essentially Spider-Man 3 suffers from carrying the role of being the Block Buster of 2007, and I’m pretty certain that if they’d dropped some elements from the story and a good few members of the cast it would have worked really well. My recommendations would be to remove Gwen Stacey and Eddie Brock from the story, as they were the characters where the least attention appears to have been spent, then screen time could have been spent on getting the three central characters of Peter, Harry and MJ right.
To wrap this up, Spider-Man 3, a rating out of 10? I’d give it a do not make another!
Spider-Man is an icon, pure and simple, he represents the everyman among the pantheon of comic book heroes, the uber-nerd who has no respect from anybody, yet when he dons the tights, he becomes a hero. The first movie captured the wonder of the transformation from zero to hero and the second movie anchored the hero into a world where grey is more predominant than black and white.
The third movie attempts to elevate Spider-Man as hero to the masses, where his actions are no longer viewed with suspicion, but rather with respect. It starts off well enough in Spider-Man 3, a less than happy Harry Osborne takes on his late fathers mantle as the Green Goblin and almost beats Spider-Man to a pulp, if not for an ill-placed pipe and a case of amnesia.
Then the race is on to quickly introduce the rest of the cast, Gwen Stacey, Eddie Brock, Captain Stacey, Flint Marko, J Jonah Jamieson, Betty Brant let alone Aunt May, Uncle Ben, Sandman, Venom and Harry’s butler. There’s also a lot of faces from the first two movies and cameos from Stan Lee and others who have worked with director Sam Rami in the past, including a funny, but seriously overlong and unnecessary piece with Bruce Campbell in a posh French restaurant.
You could never accuse Sam Rami of not making the most of his action pieces, they all zing with lots of movement, dazzling camera movement and lots of Spider-Man heroics. He swings, he sways and he spins webs… yeah it’s all a blur of blue and red. When the action dies down though, it starts to get a bit muddled and drawn out, for a start Spider-Man 3 attempts to merge a less than happy mix of humour, pathos, musical numbers and romance, all of which seem beyond the actors to deliver. For not only are the actors struggling, they are also doing this in very tight close ups, in act it seems Samy Rami may have shot the film using two lenses, one for getting overly intimate close ups, the other uses middle distance and not much else. As an aside, I’m not sure if it was the movie itself or the screen I saw it at, but many scenes seemed to be out of focus.
Essentially Spider-Man 3 suffers from carrying the role of being the Block Buster of 2007, and I’m pretty certain that if they’d dropped some elements from the story and a good few members of the cast it would have worked really well. My recommendations would be to remove Gwen Stacey and Eddie Brock from the story, as they were the characters where the least attention appears to have been spent, then screen time could have been spent on getting the three central characters of Peter, Harry and MJ right.
To wrap this up, Spider-Man 3, a rating out of 10? I’d give it a do not make another!
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