There is one great scene in “Spider-Man 3,” and you can pretty much leave the theatre once it’s over, but for those three or four minutes you wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. An escaped convict named Flint Marko (Thomas Haden Church) flees the New York City police and tumbles, as you do, into a Particle Physics Test Facility. He finds himself in a sandpit, subjected to what we are told is “demolecularization,” a process familiar to anyone who pounds crackers to make a cheesecake crust. Once the experiment is over, the sand lies still; then it stirs and heaves, and, like a crumbling Lazarus, Marko rises again, his legs sifting and scattering with the effort. Finally, he staggers upright to reveal his transfigured self: Sandman, his flesh and blood blown away for good, and an odd look—part mourning, part implacable resolve—dimly discernible on his granular face. From here on, he will be storming dust, a wondrous mixture of the quick and the dead.
It is thrilling to imagine what Guillermo del Toro, who made “Pan’s Labyrinth,” or the James Cameron who brought us “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” would do with Sandman. Both directors are obsessed with shapeshifters—with their sad restlessness, their ability to conjure threat out of the apparently fragile. The director of “Spider-Man 3,” Sam Raimi, is unconcerned by such niceties; to him, Sandman is just a bullying baddie against whom Spider-Man (Tobey Maguire) must pit his web and his wits. The film is certainly well stocked with villainy. Besides Sandman, there is the New Goblin (James Franco), better known as Harry Osborn, of whom I had personally had my fill by the end of the first movie. He is the son of the late Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), and his agonized, drawn-out desire to make Spider-Man pay for that death makes Hamlet’s revenge look like a snap decision. We also have Venom (Topher Grace), who is introduced, with something close to panic, two-thirds of the way through the film. Until then, he has been known as Eddie Brock, who takes over from Peter Parker—the earthbound, off-duty Spider-Man—as a photographer for the Daily Bugle. Eddie then gets fired, and his response, in a radical solution to youth unemployment, is to don a sticky black body stocking and a mouthful of fangs.
The most pathetic aspect of “SpiderMan 3” is that stickiness. In an early scene, a meteorite crashes to Earth, and from it crawls what seems to be a tiny garbage sack with half a mind of its own: not a bad image of where this film belongs. And, would you believe, the first person this superblob attaches itself to is, yes, Peter Parker. It doesn’t choose him; nobody has targeted him—of all Earth’s inhabitants, he just happens to be close by. Is this truly the best that the filmmakers can be bothered to do for our delight? Just how easily and stupidly pleased do they presume we are? Peter’s college professor (Dylan Baker) declares that the black stuff “amplifies characteristics of its host.” Fine, and I vaguely understand what occurs when it latches onto Eddie. The first host, however, is Spider-Man himself, and this is where the film becomes so embarrassing that you have to crouch down and stuff popcorn in your ears.
The joke about Peter has always been how uncool he is. “You are such a nerd,” his girlfriend, Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst), sighs, thus giving a breath of hope to all the nerds in the audience. Once infected by the black stuff, he should by rights become an übernerd, but the movie can’t decide what it wants. One moment he is being eyed by girls in the street, and the next they are shying away from him, as he struts along like John Travolta at the start of “Saturday Night Fever.” You laugh, but the sound of it dies in your throat. Peter then dances in a night club, but unveiling a mean and moody Tobey Maguire is roughly as convincing as asking Norah Jones to rap. Dumbest of all is the change of hair style, as Peter stops combing his bangs sideways and lets them flop down over his brow. He looks like the bronze medalist in a teen-age Hitler-impersonation contest. Spider-Man, meanwhile, gets his own makeover, oiling into a different outfit (black is the new red), and hanging out moodily on church spires. What is being amplified here?
If “Spider-Man 3” is a shambles, that’s because it makes the rules up as it goes along. By the end, for instance, Sandman has become the size of an office block, each swinging fist as big as a truck, his personality reduced to brutishness. I half expected him to come after Spider-Man and Mary Jane carrying a gigantic bucket and spade. By what criterion did he grow so mountainous? Is he like a Transformer, or more like a genie? The fact is that if the fantastical is to flourish it must lay down the conditions of its magic and abide by them; otherwise, we feel cheated. (Tolkien knew this better than anyone.) Some viewers will take the New Goblin, whose name sounds like a small-circulation poetry magazine, to be a vessel of unnatural forces, while others will see him, when he fires up his rocket-powered skateboard, as a rich kid with too many toys. That’s the problem with this third installment of the franchise: not that it’s running out of ideas, or lifting them too slavishly from the original comic, but that it lunges at them with an infantile lack of grace, throwing money at one special effect after another and praying—or calculating—that some of them will fly.
