Spidermediocre

Rating: 6/10 (5 May 2007)

With the first two "Spider-Man" films, director Sam Raimi took on the thankless job of transferring one of the most popular comic book superheroes of all time to the big screen and managed the trick with grace, energy and aplomb.
As depicted in those films, young newspaper photographer Peter Parker was a lovable nerd, his alter-ego Spider-Man was a saucy and valiant altruist, his sweetheart Mary Jane Watson was a sweet but somewhat broken flower, his best buddy Harry Osborn was a happy dope crippled with Oedipal neuroses, and his nemeses -- the diabolically warped scientists Doctor Octopus and the Green Goblin -- were suitably juicy, fiendish and larger than life.
The two "Spider-Man" movies were rivaled only by Tim Burton's "Batman" films in bringing the paneled page to the big screen -- and they constituted a second fine series from Raimi, who made his name with the "Evil Dead" movies.
But somewhere there exists a well where filmmakers go to dredge up the creative magic required for films like these. The producers of the "Batman" movies found that well dry after Burton was replaced by Joel Schumacher, who made two awful films.
Now Raimi's latest effort, "Spider-Man 3," is here, and while it's nowhere near as catastrophic as, say, "Batman & Robin," it's long, wan and tired in the vein of "Superman Returns." There's still a lightness of touch -- Raimi can reliably punctuate a film of this scale with skewed humor -- but the verve, the thrill, the razzle and the dazzle are all but gone. And I suspect people who love Spider-Man from the comic books will be more disappointed with it than people whose chief connection to him is through the movies.
Raimi has all his stars back: Tobey Maguire in the title role, Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane, James Franco as Harry, Rosemary Harris as Aunt May. They're joined by two new faces: Thomas Haden Church as career criminal Flint Marko who transforms into the Sandman, and Topher Grace, as Parker's career rival, Eddie Brock, who becomes the anti-Spider-Man known as Venom.
They're all perfectly suited to their tasks: the strengths of Maguire, Dunst, Franco and Harris have been steady throughout the series; Church and Grace fit their roles nicely; and such stalwarts as J. K. Simmons, Elizabeth Banks and, especially, Bruce Campbell provide swell comic moments.
But the comedy is surrounded by a lot of melodramatic storytelling, little of which truly compels: In addition to a romantic crisis with Mary Jane and a protracted effort to reconcile with Harry, Parker's host to an alien parasite that changes his personality, he learns that Marko is the real killer of his Uncle Ben, and he accidentally creates -- and then must vanquish -- Venom. And the action scenes, so impressive in the previous films, bring nothing new or especially memorable.
"Spider-Man 3" is a likable film -- Maguire's personality, or Raimi's channeled through him, is genuinely charming. But the tenor of the film is too often too muted, melancholy and enervated for something of its size. When Parker first figured out how to swoop through the city on his webs in the first film, it imparted a rush. But nothing here quite ever catches so big a breeze; far too often, it feels grounded, dutiful, dull. At the end, Parker is ambivalent about both his romance and his crime-fighting career. And I suspect that audiences might feel similarly uncertain about further Spider-Man adventures.