The
case for the defence
wwww
It's always the way, isn't it? You adore a movie, but the reviews are mixed, and before long everyone only talks about the bad stuff, never the good. And in this case it's a terrible shame, to be honest, because while the bad stuff (and there's much less of it than you'd think) is still bad, the good stuff is excellent. Allow me to explain myself.
When
the story kicks off, it's only a matter of months, if not weeks, after
the events of Spider-Man 2. Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) and Mary
Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst) are together at last. Peter's best friend Harry
Osborn (James Franco) is now very much not his friend anymore after events
of the last two movies, but other than that Peter's life is going pretty
well. As you can imagine, this general pleasantness lasts about twenty
minutes, then the three-villain smackdown begins.
Things grow increasingly complicated from there: Peter discovers who was really responsible for his uncle's death- the shape-shifting Sandman (Thomas Haden Church) and before long his desire for revenge spins out of control, helped in no small part by a mysterious black costume that literally just appears one night. All this vengeance and angst unsurprisingly leads to tension with Mary Jane, but pretty classmate Gwen Stacy (Bryce Dallas Howard) seems to have an interest in Peter too. And that's not even getting into Harry's plotline, or Venom's, or that convenient case of amnesia...
If this sounds rather too soap-opera-ish for you (and when it's written down like that, boy, it really does) don't worry, there's enough fighting going on to please even the most ardent of action fans: when the mid-air fight between Harry on his hoverboard and an out-of-costume Spider-Man is the least interesting battle, you know you have a crowd-pleaser on your hands. Not only that, but the final showdown, featuring all the key characters fighting it out at a construction site, is a fanboy's wet dream- it feels like a video game, it looks fantastic, it has a giant sand monster - and yet by this point you geniunely feel for all the characters involved, so much that the conclusion is surprisingly tragic for a Big Summer Movie. (See also: Pirates of the Caribbean 3- are blockbusters getting darker? It's beginning to seem so.)
It's also hard to fault the acting: Tobey Maguire is as good here as he was in the previous two films, although the dancing was a little much; Kirsten Dunst puts in a fine performance as the increasingly lonely Mary Jane; Topher Grace as Eddie Brock oozes sleeze and irresponsibility- and James Franco almost steals the show, his Harry veering about from nice guy to psychopath, with the odd bit of smug-bastard lunacy along the way. Likewise, the adults all impress, with only Thomas Haden Church hitting the occasional flat note. (I also want to put in a word for Mageina Tovah as Peter's neighbour, Ursula- as in the last movie, she only has a tiny role, but she exudes such warmth and shy sweetness it's impossible not to like her.)
So what are the film's faults? As has been mentioned oh, a couple of times, there's too many characters- Sandman would be my choice if we had to lose a villain, and while it's good to see Gwen finally making it to the big screen her character's not completely necessary, either. It's pretty lazy writing to have MJ kidnapped three times in three movies, and both dance scenes could've been cut to half their length. All that, and the fact that the last-minute revelation Harry recieves from a minor character has got to go down as one of the weirdest plot devices in movie history- a pity, because character-wise it's a important scene, and yet all we got was something that smacked of a hasty rewrite. However- and this is important- none of this is anywhere near enough to ruin the movie. Sure, you can say that that's just because I'd been looking forward to it for three years, and anything that wasn't Batman and Robin Part Two would have pleased me, but I geniunely do think this is a great movie, and worthy of your time. Because this is at its heart a movie about love- love between family, love between friends, love between two people who know they'll always have difficulites but are determined to make a go of it nonetheless. And that's why for all its flaws, this is still probably the most mature and thoughtful blockbuster of the year-
-ladies and gentlemen, I give you the best superhero trilogy of all time.