SPOILER ALERT: Some mild spoilers ahead! However, [http://thepete.com/thepetes-r-rated-review-of-spider-man-3/|unlike my last post on this film], there are no swear words. Try to enjoy it anyway. OK, so I know I said I wouldn't say much more about this movie, but I felt like I wanted to be a bit more specific and profanity-free. Now on to the review! Uuuum, Spider-Man 3 sucks beyond suckage. It's got 5 subplots and no actual main plot. Sure, Spider-Man is the title character, but the film constantly shifts focus away from him to one of the supporting characters and from them onto another and so on and so on so that every time you start to care for someone you get jerked around to another set of characters. Back on MST3k, Joel/Mike and the 'bots would be referring to each subplot as it's own movie. "Meanwhile, in yet another movie." Of course, each subplot deserved to be its own movie, frankly, since all of the bad guys were definitely interesting enough to merit their own 120 minute spectacle opposite the hero who suffers from more contrived character motivations than the last movie he was in. In the first Spider-Man movie, I found myself 90 percent happy with director Sam Raimi's choices. Over all, I felt that it was a Spider-Man Movie in a proper sense. The spirit of the character and the comic were both captured on screen. The second Spider-Man movie was fine, but it wasn't a proper Spider-Man movie. It was a typical Sam Raimi movie. As I recall, it was filled with a lot of cute screaming girls and scariness with a lot of absurd action and plot directions lacking motivation. Peter Parker has trouble feeling like he's living up to his Spider-Powers so he loses them. It's not Doc Ock that steals them from him, like in an actual comic--noooo! It's his own psyche--makes no sense. When he finally realizes he has to live up to his great power equalling responsibility, he simply decides to make his powers come back. They do and voila, the end of the movie can happen. Idiotic. Likewise Spider-Man 3 is littered with plot devices and plot points that seem to be there solely to keep the plot going and do not exist through any inherent logic. Like the meteorite that delivers Spidey's black costume. For no apparent reason, the costume goes to great lengths to target Peter Parker. Of course, if Sam Raimi had Peter examine the meteorite as part of a class experiment, the costume leaping from the meteorite onto him would have made sense. Instead, the film has the costume, in its goo form, leap onto the back of Peter's moped as Peter drives MJ home. It remains in hiding for a quite a lot of screen time before it finally jumps on Peter. Elsewhere in the film, fashion model, lab partner to Peter, daughter of the police chief, and MAJOR character from the comic Gwen Stacy, is doing a modeling gig in a sky scraper when a nearby construction crane goes out of control, seemingly targeting her. She is the ONLY person to fall from the building when the crane tears two holes in the 'scraper and no other buildings are harmed by the rabid crane. Spidey saves her and knowing that she's such a major character from the comic, one naturally assumes that she'll be a major character in the rest of the movie. NOPE. She could be any woman. The only reason she is Gwen is because Sam Raimi and his co-writers wanted her to be Gwen Stacy. The few critics that like this film cite the action scenes as being incredible. I beg to differ. While most of them looked realistic, as with the last Spider-Man movie, I found them physically unbelievable. Sure, it's a comic book movie, so it's supposed to be fake, but not fakey. The Spider-Man comic is best known for being very realistically written. Peter Parker isn't Clark Kent. When Spider-Man has to fight crime in a bad rain storm, he can't just fly above the clouds like Superman. He's got real problems too, like rent and his job and his studies and MJ. The whole point of seeing a live-action Spider-Man movie is to see it more real than it is in the comic--not less real. We want realistic action, not cartoon action. Sadly, it's all so horribly fake and out there (but not very clever or interesting) that you just know that things are going to work out so you sit back and wait for them to do exactly that. Then there's the dance number. See, while the costume in the comic only changed Peter's personality in that he was more violent and loved web-swinging more, the movie had to dumb it down. The costume makes Peter evil--of course, Sam Raimi defines evil as basic douchebaggedness and comic relief, too. In Jar-Jar Binks, case, I'd say comic relief characters CAN be truly evil in film, but when you make your hero do simply embarrassing things on top of things that are just absurd, inside the confines of a super-hero action movie, you're violating the trust of the people who paid to see your movie. This is why (and when) I walked out. Sure, action movies can be funny, but don't ask me to like a character that shames himself and don't ask me to like a movie that suddenly becomes a movie I'd have never paid for if I had known it was that kind of movie (a musical). I brought up Jar-Jar Binks for another reason. This film reminds me of Phantom Menace in that it's just horrible. There are snippets of good stuff (as with TPM), but generally speaking, it's atrocious on par with George Lucas' First Big Mistake. As friend of ThePete [http://thefelties.blogspot.com/|Andrew Moore] put it, Sam Raimi Schumachered it, taking an otherwise reasonable franchise and making it so comedic, absurd and cartoony as to repulse any reasonable adults from theater seats.
Orignal From: ThePete's PG rated Spider Man 3 Review
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