"Spider-Man 3"

Spidey comes back swingin'! The third installment in the beloved blockbuster series may be the biggest, splashiest and best one yet.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Movies, Movie Reviews, Spider-Man, Arts & Entertainment, comic books, Tobey Maguire, Reviews

Photo: Columbia Pictures

Tobey Maguire in "Spider-Man 3."

May 4, 2007 | Now that summer movies have become events, it's getting harder and harder for directors to give us plain old movies anymore. Pre-release advertising and hype have become such a big part of the moviegoing experience that the pictures themselves sometimes seem like afterthoughts, the finale of an ad campaign rather than the subject of it. That's particularly true with the third installment -- not to mention the fourth or fifth -- of any given franchise: Our experience, and our enjoyment, of the previous pictures serve as a kind of internal, self-generated advertising. We look forward to what's ahead, talking ourselves out of the feeling that we already know what to expect.

The good news about "Spider-Man 3" is that it's more of the same -- except better. Sam Raimi's Spider-Man pictures, based on the characters created by Stan Lee (who has a cameo here) and Steve Ditko, have become summer-movie staples: They're not perfect films -- they could be more resonant, more memorable. When I look back on the 2002 "Spider-Man" and the 2004 "Spider-Man 2," I tend to remember details about certain characters (the swirling, self-motivated tentacles of Alfred Molina's Doc Ock; the icy, conflicted glare of Willem Dafoe's Norman Osborn) more than I do any plot twists or overarching themes.

But even though all the Spider-Man movies, including this one, are cranked up with special effects, Raimi resists being a slave to them. His commitment to the more human aspects of storytelling is like a stubborn weed: The movies may be getting bigger, splashier, and yet Raimi's camera seems most at home when it's trained on, say, a seemingly simple restaurant scene between Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker and his girl, Kirsten Dunst's Mary Jane, or M.J., Watson. The massiveness of the Spider-Man movies, including the massive expectations riding on them, may occasionally distract Raimi. But he never forgets that the human element -- the idea that even superheroes with superpowers are, in so many ways, just like us -- is the thing that makes people love comic books in the first place, and that shines through in "Spider-Man 3."

"Spider-Man 3" is the most ambitious and complex Spider-Man movie yet. Its multiple plots wave themselves around, defiantly declaring their unmanageability like Doc Ock's tentacles, although Raimi does manage to wrangle them into submission by the end. "Spider-Man 3" sees every major character from the earlier films -- M.J., James Franco's Harry, and, of course, Peter Parker/Spider-Man himself -- making an awkward transition into adulthood. At the end of "Spider-Man 2," M.J. learned Spider-Man's true identity. Now she's trying to build a career, and an identity, of her own. She's landed a starring role in a Broadway play, the kind of production that, in real life, never gets made anymore: We see her singing a plaintive version of Irving Berlin's "They Say It's Wonderful" as she descends one of those curving stairways to nowhere so often seen in 1930s musicals -- perhaps Raimi's way of establishing that what we're seeing is a contemporary story set in a lost world, a place where the 20th century is not yet treated as ancient history.

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