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The 'B' Movie King
Song and dance isn’t why we go to Spidey flicks
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
If you’re going to see “Spider-Man 3” — and I’m talking to the 17 people in the country who haven’t yet — you’d better not drink anything for a coupla hours ahead of time. Or, if you do, you’d be wise to invest in a Stadium Pal.
That’s how long the movie is. And I wish I could totally say that it’s worth the strain it puts on your bladder. And it is. Except for the parts where it isn’t. And there’s way too many of those.
Like, for instance, that long scene near the start where Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) walks down a stairway in a Broadway show and sings a loooong, dull song. Or the scene where Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) does this dance routine in a jazz club.
And I’m like, is this supposed to be a musical? Or did somebody slip some mushroom juice in my Coke?
This time around, Peter and MJ are dating, and everybody in New York is a fan of Spider-Man. Peter goes, “They love me,” and he lets it go to his head.
Meanwhile, Mary Jane gets fired from her Broadway show after opening night, on account of some bad reviews — which is about as hard to swallow as a guy who can shoot webs out of his wrists and swing from skyscrapers.
Even worse, MJ doesn’t tell Peter she got canned. And he meets her at a fancy restaurant and wants to propose, but neither one of them says the right thing and they talk right past each other and the whole thing gets all angsty and boring, and even Bruce Campbell as a snooty French waiter can’t save the day.
I mean, without all these talky-talk scenes the movie would be a good hour shorter and a whole lot better. And don’t even get me started on mouthy Aunt May, who deserves a ball gag for Christmas.
Luckily, there’s some great action scenes. But there have to be when there’s three (yes, THREE) villains for Spidey to fight. Which is about two too many.
First there’s Harry (James Franco), who fights Peter with the Green Goblin gadgets because he thinks Peter killed his dad. Only then Harry gets amnesia and forgets he was trying to kill Peter. Then he eats a magical omelet and loses his amnesia and decides to kill Peter after all. Though in the end he may decide to help Peter fight the other two villains instead.
Seriously, it’s like a roomful of second-graders wrote the script for this movie while drinking 32-ounce Mountain Dews.
The second villain is shape-shifting Sandman (Thomas Haden Church). Then there’s a piece of black space poo that crashes in Central Park, approximately 2 feet from where Peter just happens to be, and follows him home, then turns itself into a new black suit for Spider-Man. And Peter doesn’t even go, “Hmmm, I don’t know where this new black suit came from — but it makes my pecs pop, so who cares?”
He just puts it on, and it makes him do weird [excrement]. He struts down the street like he’s in “Saturday Night Fever,” with these bangs slanting down across his right eye, like the emo love child of Tony Manero and Hitler. The suit also makes him do that lame-o dance I mentioned.
Then, for some reason or other, Peter rips off the black suit. And it turns back into oozy space-poo and plops down on that kid from “That ’70s Show” [Editor’s note: Topher Grace], who then turns into a big, poo-colored monster with fangs and fights Spidey, alongside the Sandman.
At this point, the Sandman has figured out how to grow to be enormous. He looks a lot like the big, dumb, snot-nosed troll in the first Harry Potter movie. No, I take it back — he’s more like the “Ghostbusters” Stay-Puft giant. And that, my friends, is not scary.
After the movie, when I was in the bathroom watering the porcelain, a few questions came to me.
How come the scientists who are conducting their superimportant particle physics experiment with a pile of sand are doing it in the middle of the night? And why don’t they have a camera or a window on their test site to make sure that someone — like, say, an escaped convict — hasn’t fallen into the sand, so that they don’t accidentally zap him and restructure his molecules so that he can become a superpowered villain?
And why did they even bother to cast Bryce Dallas Howard as Gwen Stacy, when the only thing she gets to do in the whole movie is fall off a skyscraper and get rescued by Spidey and make Mary Jane jealous?
And why hasn’t anybody prescribed antidepressants for Mary Jane, because she has become a big, honking drag — am I right?
‘SPIDER-MAN 3’ aka ‘SPIDEY 3 TIMES LONGER THAN IT NEEDS TO BE’
• Naked breasts: No, but that’s OK, since Mary Jane and Gwen are pretty flat-chested.
• Dirty words: Nope.
• Best lines: “I fell 62 floors, and someone caught me!” — Gwen Stacy
• The rest: Directed by Sam Raimi. Rated PG-13 for sequences of intense action violence. At metro theaters. 2 hours, 20 minutes.
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