Spider-Man 3: A Sticky Web

While critics have all but slammed the movie, financially it has made history. The complaints are familiar with movies headed past the first sequel: too long, too many characters, not enough development, it's the same story in a different wrapper.

But on the heals that LOST will finally define how long it will last, I know understand the hostility towards the Wall Crawler: nobody knows how many sequels will be made, and not knowing is disturbing to many critics. Some don't want to keep going to see the same franchise, others fear that the characters they know and admire will be eventually destroyed on film (ala "Batman and Robin") and would rather it die now while it's still "on stop" than to take the proverbial nose-dive.

That being said, I think this review best captures what viewers can expect from the latest installment. Here's part of their conclusion:

How to step into adulthood without being a jerk? That's just one of the questions Raimi, who co-wrote the script with his brother, Ivan Raimi, and with Alvin Sargent, riffs on here. "Spider-Man 3" is overloaded with the usual special effects, all but one of which are easily forgotten: There's simply very little that's particularly new or exciting about Spidey's swinging between and around skyscrapers while assorted baddies try to cut him down. And "Spider-Man 3," like the two pictures that preceded it, suffers from an overall lack of cohesiveness: The picture is entertaining enough as you're watching it, but afterward, the picture still feels like a bunch of events strung together, more than a rich, fluid whole.

But "Spider-Man 3" is a vast improvement on the last picture in the franchise -- in which the chemistry between M.J. and Peter was barely an afterthought -- and it's a deeper, richer picture than even the first "Spider-Man." Raimi and his co-writers have taken care to give the relationships between the characters more tangible contours than in the last picture, and the actors give better performances as a result. Dunst has more sparkle here, and Maguire draws some surprising creepiness out of his usual boy-next-door demeanor. Of all the actors here, though, Franco is the one who has improved with each successive picture: As a young man battling his own dark side, he brings smudgy layers of depth to a character that might otherwise be a cartoon. In one sequence, a verbal face-off with Peter, his left eye droops in a sinister, lazy appraisal of his sometime best friend; the moment suggests that Franco might have more to show us than most of his roles have required of him.

"Spider-Man 3" doesn't have the operatic dazzle of the first X-Men picture, or the
mournfully poetic quality of the often, and inexplicably, maligned "Superman Returns." But Raimi at least manages to make it both huge and human. He also pulls off one of the most beautiful special effects I've ever seen, in any movie, a testament to the ways in which CGI, used right, can actually humanize a film. After Flint Marko -- a criminal who's done all the wrong things for the right reasons -- steps into that whirling particle-physics blender, he's no longer himself: He's a mound of sand, a one-man desert, and before our eyes he tries to re-form himself into some semblance of the man he used to be. As he tries to stand, rivers of sand run from his muscles. His contours take shape, fall away, and then stubbornly rebuild themselves: He's a piece of sculptural poetry, a song of being and becoming, a living, moving Henry Moore statue.

Now I hope that helps anyone sitting on the fence.