The Only Spiderman 3 Review Worth Reading
Written by Mark Osborne
Published on 05/07/2007
Originally from Binary Culture / [the-lowdown.net]
http://www.binaryculture.net

I’m not writing this review because I want to. I’m writing it because posterity and all six of our readers seem to demand it. Not only is it the third installment of one of the most lucrative film franchises in history, it’s a superhero movie. Last year around this time I opened my review of Superman Returns to essentially tell Hollywood to fuck off from superhero land only to give Singer’s vision of everyone’s favorite spitcurled farm boy glowing praise.

It just goes to show how much of a hollow douchebag Kevin Smith must really be for calling out Superman as being “omnipotent” to the point of uselessness, going so far to say that were he to kill a superhero, it’d be Clark. Then again, Smith’s Superman was taken out behind the Warner Brothers backlot and shot so that Tim Burton could pursue is own miscarriage. I don’t doubt that Smith could have brought the gravitas that Singer did to the movie, but I do doubt he could do it without more penis jokes than a night at the bar with Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

Oh right, I’m supposed to be talking about Spiderman 3. Well the truth is I haven’t seen the movie, and I don’t really plan to unless it involves getting really fucking drunk beforehand and heckling the monstrosity from beginning to end. So if you want to go halves on a two-four of something that isn’t American beer, we’ll go on a double date with Kirsten and Tobey.

Surprisingly enough, I’m not even going to stay true to form with all that “true to the character” ivory tower posturing I adopted for V for Vendetta, Constantine, and pretty much anything else; Spiderman has been essentially dead to me since the Clone Saga and he has some creepy totem thing going on these days anyway. Yes, David, I know you liked “The Other.” It just sounds fucking weird to me. Write your own review, I dare you.

So anyway, I’m not not seeing Spiderman 3 because of some allegedly elitist agenda, unless self respect is elitist these days, which is probably true in Hollywood. I mean how could you feel anything less than suicidal shelling out to see this movie in light of what pretty much everyone involved has been saying for the last two to six years?

Kirsten Dunst thinks killing off Spiderman would be a great idea. She also seems to think that audiences won’t respond to a Spiderman not involving her, director Sam Raimi, and Tobey Maguire. I think it’s quite probable that she hired Todd McFarlane as her publicist, who is in turn living vicariously through her. Either that or she’s destined to be Marvel’s next Editor in Chief.

Then there’s Sam Raimi, who for a while was The Other Peter Jackson. I respected Sam Raimi for a good long time, I honestly did. Army of Darkness was great fun and I spent most of my most awkward pubescent years watching Hercules and/or Xena. My respect for him shot up when he said that he was not going to make a Venom movie; that he shared the same general dislike for the symbiote villains that I usually do. When David Fincher told Sony he wouldn’t do an origin movie and they called his bluff, he had the guts to walk out on what became the highest grossing film of all time (until it was dethroned by Harry Potter or something). I’m not usually one to flinging around the phrase “sell out,” but when you quite literally go back on your word on pretty much the only major stipulation you’ve ever had about the franchise, it’s the most polite language available.

Despite my feelings about the Wachowski Brothers in general, it’s galling to see that when they coupled genuinely progressive groundbreaking filmmaking techniques with more intellectual overreaching than Paris Hilton in a public library to make The Matrix Reloaded it was instantly and universally reviled, while no reviewer has so far been able to pan Spiderman 3 without serious reservations and qualifiers, given that the visuals represent nothing more than a lateral move and the narrative offers little more than a blatant cash in on the sudden and revolting trend of angst and self pity. When Superman got mean, it was because he was drunk. When Spiderman gets “mean,” it’s because he combed his hair forward.

I could lie and say that my only chance of sleep tonight is conjuring up images of what David Fincher’s Spiderman would have been, but while I’m sure it would have been astounding, the truth probably lies somewhere closer to (Suicide Girl) Chloe’s chest. I don’t think about comic books all the time, you know.