I love Spider-Man. I love him beyond any other super hero, living or dead. Throughout my younger days, I always connected with Peter Parker more than anyone else. And I followed him through any number of bizarre adventures. Through the dizzying highs of the Hobgoblin mystery to the violent middles of the Maximum Carnage debacle to the depressing lows of the Maximum Clonage fiasco — and, worse, everything that came after it — Spider-Man was the only super hero that ever felt real to me. He was, true to the “everyman” image, exactly who I thought I would be, if I were a super hero.

Which is a bit ridiculous, considering he is a man with the proportionate speed and strength of a spider and he’s married to a supermodel, whereas I am a man with the proportionate speed and strength of a lesser man. And I’m dating the girl who writes a Mary Kate & Ashley Olsen fansite. But, still, once you get beyond that, the similarities are striking.

Sam Raimi has brought Spider-Man to the big screen three times, and each time he’s done it a little differently. The first Spider-Man was a straight-up origin story, a back-to-basics approach to the super hero genre that had been killed by the last two Batman films (before Batman Begins). In Spider-Man 2, he bucked the more-is-better trend of most super hero sequels and crafted a more personal story, less good-versus-evil and more a story of a young hero trying to find his centre.

Spider-Man 3 is actually the first true-to-life bombastic super hero movie of the trilogy, as Raimi’s packed the film with THREE villains of various stripes and motivations, as well as introducing two more major supporting cast members, and fleshing out a couple of others that lacked screen time in previous installments.

As if that weren’t enough, the film also seeks to continue the narrative from the second installment, ramping up the Spider-Man-versus-Peter Parker dynamic big time, thanks to the addition of the alien symbiote.

It all seems like a recipe for an overly long, rambling and overwhelming film. A film that collapses under its own weight, much like X-Men 3: The Last Stand did. (See my review of that film for more on that.) While I still had some hope going into the theatre this afternoon, I have to admit that I was pretty wary of a franchise that had, quite simply, run its course. It seemed like there was no way a film with so many characters and so much plot could avoid being an overwrought mess.

And, by the end, it was. But I mean it in the absolute best sense.

But I still liked it

It’s very difficult to review this film, and even harder to give it a negative review, because if I were to generate a list of the positives versus the negatives, there’d be far more positives than negatives. Put simply, there was a lot to love about about Spider-Man 3.

For example:

• The casting of the new villains! Thomas Haden Church made a fantastic Sandman, looking almost exactly like the comic book character and managing guilt-ridden pathos with little more than the baring of his lower teeth. Similarly, Topher Grace has truly found his calling: he’s an asshole. All those years of playing nice guy Eric Forman were clearly for waste, as where Grace excels is as a completely self-absorbed jerk.
• James Franco! Who took his whole Daniel DeSario act to a whole new level of confused-evil as the New Goblin. His freaky Garry Shandling-esque smile is appropriate for any emotion!
• Asshole Tobey Maguire! Once again, I feel like in Spider-Man 3 he found his calling: as a jerk. Never has Tobey looked so enthusiastic about a performance than as the drunk-with-power symbiote-fueled lethario he turns into in this film. In doing so, he contributes to some very funny scenes.
• The action! They’ve come so far from the video game-ish CG of the first movie. All the action scenes in Spider-Man 3 look incredibly sharp. There’s some great, fast directing, and the climax is probably the most technically impressive scene in the whole trilogy. Totally worth seeing this in theatres just for that scene.
• Bruce Campbell! He’s always my favourite.
• The stories! All three of them were, in actuality, quite good!

More on that last point

Unfortunately, it’s the fact that this film had three (mostly) separate good stories that sinks it. Each thread — the Sandman story, the Harry Osborn story and the Venom story — could have easily satisfied a ninety-minute movie by itself, and would have done so in the great tradition of the previous two films.

I wouldn’t really change anything about the three stories, aside from giving the alien costume a more plausible introduction and maybe not messing with the Spider-Man origin so much with the Sandman arc, but rather it’s just that each needed far more time to breathe. By the end of the movie, I was left feeling like I really should care more about what’s going on.

It couldn’t have been longer. That much is clear. At 139 minutes, this was too long as it is. It was just a case of trying to fit too much into one film. This plot would have been phenomenal as part of a multi-part film (in the tradition of Back to the Future II & III and those silly Pirate films) or as a TV miniseries, but as a singular film it just resulted in some wasted characters.

Venom, especially, deserved better. I think a lot of this is due to the uncertainty surrounding Spider-Man 4. If Raimi was really planning on directing it himself, I’d bet they would have left most of the Venom story for that installment, continuing it from plot seeds planted in this one. Since I think he sees this as his swan song from the series (and likely Maguire’s and Dunst’s, as well), he tried to wrap way too much up too quickly.

Still, though, taken as a loose collection of action and comedy scenes, this is very good. It’s only when taken as a whole that it’s lacking. The best thing that can be said about it is that it doesn’t cop-out with a everything-is-great ending, and instead keeps true to the spirit of Peter Parker as an ultimately tragic figure, a hard-luck hero to the end.

Recommended, but not enthusiastically so.