Spider-Man 3: Critic Reviews

Spider-Man 3 is product, but it's a machine that tickles your eyes.

Aesthetically and conceptually wrung out, fizzled rather than fizzy, this latest installment in the spider-bites-boy adventure story shoots high, swings low and every so often hits the sweet spot, but mostly just plods and plods along.

As he scampers around the bathtub of popular culture, Spidey is beginning to exhaust everyone's patience.

The third adventure of the guy with arachnid superpowers tries gamely, is solidly entertaining and possesses dazzling special effects, but it falls short of the near-perfection of the Spidey sequel.

In an apparent effort to put a stake in the heart of the franchise that threatens to define his career, director Sam Raimi has delivered an overlong, visually incoherent, mean-spirited and often just plain awful Spider-Man 3.

The movie has the curious effect of leaving you over-fulfilled. When it's done, any appetite for another event picture, even one half as well made as this, is temporarily curbed.

A certain twee anachronism has always been part of the Spider-Man tradition -- ditto dexterous, old-fashioned fun. But this summer's first obligatory blockbuster is all thumbs.

I'll take a wild guess and say that Spidey fans come for the action and, on that count, they will not be disappointed.

After two epic successes that deserved their success, the latest installment swings between intense action sequences and unaccountably flat dramatic interludes.

The script is busy with so many supporting characters and plot detours that the series' charming idiosyncrasy is sometimes lost in the noise. Fortunately, it's entertaining noise.

The combat showstoppers, though still too CG to be felt as much as they're admired, should thrill fanboys to no end.

All in all, the fun has simply gone out of it.

What's missing? Momentum. A touch of meanness. A centrifugal threat like Molina's octopus man. (In terms of dramatic stature, the three villains here don't add up to one Doc Ock.)

Laziness mingles with overkill, violence with mawkishness: most of the characters weep at the slightest provocation, but heads are beaten, burned, and sheared off by passing subway trains.

Too many villains, too many pale plot strands, too many romantic misunderstandings, too many conversations, too many street crowds looking high into the air and shouting "oooh!" this way, then swiveling and shouting "aaah!" that way.

It's as if director Sam Raimi felt he had to give us more of everything, and in the process lost sight of what made the first two films so enjoyable.

Three films in, how is New York's premier webmaster holding up? Not badly; not spectacularly.

Director Sam Raimi tries to pump some life into this dutiful enterprise but seems more than a little bored himself, especially when he's getting mushy about Spider-Man's moral decline and regeneration.

Spider-Man 3 kicks off this Summer of Sequels in big, loud, occasionally clever, but more often meandering ways. It's not dull, exactly, but neither is it much fun.

It's mostly enjoyable. But it's a limping effort compared with the first two. The trilogy hobbles to a finish when it should have soared.

What's worse is that after a fairly pedestrian opening, director Sam Raimi loses all control of the film as it rambles from storyline to storyline in search of a center.

No matter how much it costs and what its flaws, Spider-Man 3 still gets a lot of bang for the buck.

Over-produced, over-publicized, over-designed, over-computerized and just plain over the moon, it's so preposterously overwrought with so many bewildering plots juggling simultaneously for over-emphasis, there's no entry point for criticism.

After the significant improvement of the second installment over the first, new entry reps a roughly equivalent dip in quality and enjoyment, with Spidey now giving off the faint odor of running on fumes.