Spider-man 3 is possibly the worst movie ( never mind the adjective) I’ve seen in recent times. A movie that I caught for the first time on HBO last night, and I was glad about two things – one, the fact that I did not spend any money on theater tickets or DVDs to watch this unredeemable pile of schlock, and two, there were ads littering the screentime. The ads helped lessen the effect, heck, they might have actually deadened the pain enough for me. Sure, there is eye-candy and dollops of webswinging and skyscraper-crunching action. I swear I wanted to kick Tobey Maguire in the face everytime he took off his mask and started off on one of his wide-eyed “acting” fits. By the time he metamorphoses into aggressive Peter Darker who walks and moves like a caffeine-infused, ADD-version of John Travolta, I would have gladly stopped the kicking and picked up a power-drill or a chainsaw. Or am I getting this all wrong and the morons behind this enterprise filmmakers were trying to say that if you are a nerd in school, cool superpowers, a hot girlfriend and an alien symbiote pumping testosterone into your body will never make you cool – you will become a Super-Nerd. Speaking of nerds, a message to the CGI animators: basic high school science says sand plus water no equal mud.
Some of the worst scenes that stick to my mind – (get it off, auuuuugh, get it off my brain!)
Venom and Sandman hooking up together like a blind-date-gone-awry – “hey, random-guy-in-green-t-shirt, you like Spiders?” “No, black-spiderlike-man, I hate them.” “Great, I hate them too, let’s team up.” “Sure!”.
Aunt May pimping off her engagement ring to her nephew. Just ask the cheapskate to buy a new one, already!
An escape convict is chased across a forest and lands in a gigantic bowl. A science experiment in progress. In the middle of nowhere. AT MIDNIGHT. “Hey doctor, the weight on the sand module is different.” “Ah, don’t worry, it’s probably just a bird.” Do you really want to hear a rant about the weight difference between a bird and a man?
An extended scene involving J Jonah Jameson, pills, Betty Brant and a buzzer that was Johnny Lever-meets-Kader Khan.
And I think there’s this epic conspiracy among those who make superhero films, to get a bunch of kids acting in random scenes saying “whoa!”, “cool!” and assorted saccharine-loaded noises. What kind of twisted mind thinks up situations like these?If it were India, I would think it were the star secretaries who were jostling each other to have their kids doing cute stuff.
And the lines, GOOD GOD, the Almighty Lines. “I like being bad”, Eddie Brock-as-Venom intones, sliding along a wall. Oooooooo, malevolent evil! “I have nothing left”, says the granite-faced Sandman, an obvious graduate of Hemant Birje’s WAH! ( Woody and Ham, for those who came in late) school of acting. Ooooooo, emotions. “You ok?”, Spider-man to Mary Jane, after she has been kidnapped by his evil twin and left hanging atop a skyscraper in a taxi. A taxi supported by webs generated from said twin’s sticky bodily fluids, after she’s been waiting for her perennially-late boyfriend to show up and rescue her, and is nearly crushed by concrete blocks before plummetting down aforementioned skyscraper while screaming at Bruce Dickinson levels. There’s something to be said here about words failing me, but apparently they failed the screenplay writer ( Alvin Sargent, I believe) too. Aunt May mouthed some pithy lines about good and forgiveness, Mary Jane was as irritating a girlfriend could ever get and well, I am done talking about the movie.
The verdict?
I am sticking to torture porn from now on.
oooh, but Betty Brant is cute though ;)
That she is, but she acts like an oversexed version of what she was in 1/2.
Totally agree. The only good part was Bruce’s cameo.
I was thinking that too. The irritated expression he makes is just the perfect reaction one has to Parker’s antics in the movie.
Aha.. beatzo finally awakens!
hmmmm. pat on the back for us smart ones, who ditched the previous sequel as well..
If you ditched Spider-man 2, you are not that smart at all. Seriously, go watch it! :-)
Hey, is that a Shift + Epic Fall ? :)
COme to think of it, a Tectonic shift would be God’s notion of saying that our lives are about to Epic Fail.
Hehehe. :)
What did you think of TDK? Or is that a topic for another post?
I watched it thrice already, on IMAX each time. And seriously, everybody on the internet has dissected it to the point where even if you don’t see it, you can arrive at an opinion by just reading the reviews.
I will probably write about it around this time next year. :-D
I watched it thrice already, on IMAX each time
I hate you. No, really.
Argh!
Easily the best of the horrible Spider-Man film series.
Ok, I will pretend I didn’t hear that. :-D
But seriously, why?
I will admit that I mostly thought the first Spider-Man was good, but my god the first hour is really hard to sit through after the second time. It’s just slow, and all the awkwardness of watching fuckup Peter bumble and stumble through life isn’t really so much entertaining as painful. The second half is much stronger, but the movie still misses what I consider to be Spider-Man’s defining trait: He’s one of the original wise-cracking heroes. Before you saw jokey wiseasses beating up bad guys all over the movies, there was a Spider-Man. And in the first Spider-Man movie, he manages ONE little wisecrack – “Hey kid, let mom and dad talk for a minute” – and that’s it. It’s a good line, but it’s hardly capturing the spirit of what has always defined the character to me – the sense of fun he feels when he’s in the costume. Life may be rough outside the costume, but in it, he’s free and lovin’ it.
There’s not really anything nice I can say about Spider-Man 2. There are three action sequences in the whole movie, one of which is over almost as soon as it starts and another which is the sleep-inducing climax. Other than that, the entire movie is about Peter Parker: Professional Crybaby. He can stare out a window and IMAGINE conversations that never took place which cause him to weep like an itty bitty bitch! I guess that’s kind of a superpower. Even more amazing: His ability to WILL AWAY his superpowers simply by not wanting to be Spider-Man anymore. That’s one atrocious plot device. Add to this the fact that he looks like a Grade-A Moron throughout the film for how he handles MJ and Harry (seriously, he can’t even muster up a single “No” about Spider-Man killing Norman – royal idiocy to the point where you start to wonder if Peter thinks he DID kill Norman), and then of course the version of Doc Ock that somehow steals the main gimmick that makes Venom unique – his multiple personalities – and you get a complete clusterfuck. And yeah, Spider-Man is actually LESS FUN than ever before.
What Spider-Man 3 captures, then, is fun. It’s still disappointing in other ways – they totally cock up how they handle Venom, even though I rather enjoyed their incarnation of Eddie. But there’s so many FUN scenes in this movie. First off, you get more SPIDER-MAN scenes than either of the first two films COMBINED. Second, you get the best action sequences in the series to date – from Peter fighting Harry out of costume to the final confrontation and even points in-between like the subway fight, there’s a lot of golden material here. Thirdly, Peter finally gets a scene where he gets to act like the sarcastic wiseass I’ve always known him to be in a fight – although sadly it happens when he’s supposed to be under the “evil influence” of the black suit, but whatever. And fourth, yeah, the black suit provides for some truly hilarious scenes. The dance in the jazz club, the walking montage down the street – uproariously funny. Even when Peter winds up yet AGAIN crying like an itty bitty bitch, Harry’s glee over it is so hilarious that it really helps mute the annoyance level. Mix in the best musical score of all three – I’ve long been a lover of Danny Elfman, but Christopher Young’s themes for the black suit and for Sandman trump ANYTHING Elfman pulled out on this franchise – and yeah, this is easily my favorite of the three. It’s still not there, and certainly not as good as the currently animated series that is tearing up the airwaves stateside, but it’s easily my favorite of the films.
You forgot the bridge scene, which was, in my book, the stupidest thing in the movie. “I hate you, you suck, we’re breaking up (but I can’t tell you the danger we’re all in)” SHOULD have been, “Hey, Pete. Harry’s gone NUTS, but, well, you’re Spider-Man, so you can probably take him. See those bushes… RIGHT THERE? He’s hiding behind them. Go get’em, tiger.”
Hahahah. True. By that point, I was just cringing in my seat and waiting for the next ad break to even include it in my consciousness.
Totally agree. HATED this film.
Did you see Machine Girl yet, btw?
I did and I looooooooooooved it.
yeah true. YUCK!!!
I also saw it for the first time in HBO.
Ah, it’s true. TV does bring absent friends together. And how have you been doing, man?
So, going by the current trend, we could expect Batman 2 review next year? :P
I loved the movie on the IMAX. Not sure if it would have impressed me so much, had I seen it on a small screen.
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