Welcome to Summer '07!

Rating: 6/10 (7 May 2007)

This is first giant blockbuster of the year, and like most of them, it's not very good. Unfortunately, it follows two pretty good Spider-Man films, so that's kind of a disappointment. If you've seen the previews, you can probably guess what goes wrong: too many villains, and too many characters in general. If you thought Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest was sloppily written with all its stories going on (and I didn't myself), this one's going to look like Hell. They have to cut between Peter and MJ, Harry Osbourne, Flint Marko (aka Sandman), and Eddie Brock (aka, at least late in the movie, Venom). A million things happen, and the screenwriters (only three listed, but my guess is there were dozens) have a difficult time keeping it together. They seem to forget characters' motivations at times, and they forget to explain some things, or explain them so quickly that, when they're referenced later in the movie, you have to backtrack and figure it all out. My favorite is the whole relationship between Eddie Brock, Peter Parker's photographer rival, and Gwen Stacy, a classmate of Parker's who becomes Mary Jane's romantic rival. Gwen serves as about ten different plot points at once; it becomes pretty amusing. And she's played by Bryce Dallas Howard, most famous for her extremely bizarre turns in M. Night Shyamalan's last two movies (and to a lesser extent her excellent performance in Lars von Trier's Manderlay). It's just weird to see her as the blonde bombshell type. Gwen and Eddie's relationship is briefly mentioned twice early in the film, with the two barely making contact in the two scenes they share. Later, once Brock is Venom, he is apparently angry at Spider-Man for stealing his girlfriend. This whole thing just made me giggle. Oh, and don't even ask about Harry Osbourne's butler, who magically appears at one point and delivers the stupidest deus ex machina in recent movie memory. Okay, so the movie's badly made. Doesn't mean it isn't entertaining, though. The action sequences are fun, even though a couple of them are so fast you can't tell what's going on. There are a couple of comic sequences which are amusing, even if they feel weird in the context of the film. Particularly funny is the scene where Peter Parker struts down the street wearing the evil black Spider-Man costume under his clothes (it amplifies his aggression, or some such swiftly explained nonsense). And, hey, although it's bad, it's never boring, and I'd even say it's close to entertainingly bad. I mean, I can't hate a film too much that has a climax where Tobey Maguire fights the mechanic from Wings and Eric Foreman.