Hype creep

Rating: 5/10 (14 May 2007)

You may have missed it but something extraordinary happened recently. Perhaps you were busy romancing your best friend's girlfriend, drowning the kittens of your partner's grotesque children in the canal or like me, trying to remove an entire layer of fatty tissue from your bath tub after the acid had drained out but over in America, punters paid $148M to see Spider-man 3. That's nearly 5 pounds sterling.
What made them do it? Well it wasn't coherence, good writing or sharp plotting but we can assume millions of dollars worth of marketing played their part. A popular character, two reasonably entertaining and well judged films and the kind of brand recognition that would make Coke envious, all fed into the pre-summer hype and when there's that much anticipation amongst the young and the socially stunted these things have a habit of becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy. It's just a pity that the movie itself isn't very good.
Its fascinating, you might think and even if you wouldn't I would, that parents are a great deal more relaxed about entertainment than other confected consumables. Spider-man is the ultimate corporate movie making exercise and the big spiders forced to pay for their egg sack progeny to watch the bloody thing, see it all as harmless, if juvenile fun. It'd be a real killjoy that berated people for enjoying this sort of thing wouldn't it? And with that in mind, on we go.
The thing is you see legions of kids, accompanied by well meaning but unconsciously hypocritical parents, lap it up like maggots to human remains. These are the same people who won't let their kids eat anything that isn't organically produced and spend hours examining packaging in supermarkets for additives. Imagine for a moment that they applied the same standard to movies. Lactating mothers whose husbands work in the city all day and didn't know they were ever pregnant, let alone looking after their 3 children, would accost miserable cinema staff and ask them things like 'has this film been written by a single individual nurturing his own idea and is the story true to the principles of creative film-making, nurtured by independently minded professionals and funded with the profits from art house festivals?' If the poor sod said no then Mum would take her offspring elsewhere, looking for wholesome, and intellectually nourishing entertainment. But we don't think this way of course and so consequently our offspring get force fed a sickly sweet diet of confected glop like 'ol Spidey here. Okay, says Sony's marketing department, the script is Sam Rami's vision of the arachnid super-hero but you only have to watch the new film to see the tension between commercial interest and the auteur imperative and you better believe the latter always gets snuffed out when there's a budget of $258M involved.
What's so depressing about Spider-man 3 is how synthetic is actually feels. It's a demographically minded, committee made 140 minutes with numerous plot strands all jockeying for attention, amidst some admittedly impressive special effects and a truckle of characters, none of whom have any time or space to develop in any satisfactory manor. Every moment is calculated with such cynicism that it's almost impossible not to feel embarrassed watching it flaunt its crowd pleasing conventions. They're well worn certainly, but we keep coming back for them like a sadist making a homeless man dance for his pleasure for the price of some cigarettes and a subway meatball sandwich. You know its self-destructive but you can't help yourself.
What works is mainly held over from previous films, which means it's extended into this one without being developed further. Maguire still doesn't have any descent quips but he's reasonably endearing if too bug eyed by half as the hero and Dunst still has a sweetness about her but the sentimental etchings of her failing relationship with Tobey, vomited into the proceedings, is enough to turn an unfocused script into pure flab in some places. You'd think a man who could ejaculate through his wrists would be interesting enough not to have girl trouble but true to her sex, Dunst is never satisfied.
Reversing a good decision from previous Spider-mans, this one has too many villains and subsequently can't give them room to develop. Thomas Haden Church is wasted as Sandman, having nothing to do but morph into a sandstorm and the film's promised "battle from within" following Peter Parker's infection with an alien parasite, turns him from an irritating but hubristic do gooder into a bit of a sticky tosser who dresses like Gomez Addams and does poor impressions of John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. Based on this evidence half the clubbers in Britain have been exposed to venom and before you rush out, that isn't a new name for an old venereal diseasethough if you're concerned you've probably got that too.
Cluttered and lacking the, er, intelligence of previous outings, Spider-man 3 is big, well dressed multiplex fodder but is in turn both childish and sugary enough to be fairly disappointing overall. Rami's screenplay is pretty dreadful so a bit of the old directorial bravado might have helped but these days the man who used to run his work through with wit and vigor behind the camera is content to point and click, leaving the real work to the effects artists. Fine but don't be surprised if you find yourself as undernourished as a kid who survives on sweets and soft drinks alone. Your Mum would have told you these things were bad for you but she was busy buying the tickets and stocking up on the popcorn.
Glazed with cash but bland as butter.