Spider-Man 3 Reviews
Top CriticAt 141 minutes, this supe-opera is seriously overextended, with four distinct subplots and way too much hand-wringing over things like the heroine's singing career.
Too many villains, too many pale plot strands, too many romantic misunderstandings, too many conversations, too many street crowds looking high into the air and shouting "oooh!" this way, then swiveling and shouting "aaah!" that way.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Nap time. Perhaps it's the weight of expectations, the rattle of a zillion calculators or the curse of Bryce Dallas Howard (forever our Lady in the Water), but the latest Spider-Man is a fussy, dispirited affair.
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| Original Score: 3/6
Raimi at least manages to make it both huge and human.
After two epic successes that deserved their success, the latest installment swings between intense action sequences and unaccountably flat dramatic interludes.
One has to consider that the film's problems -- and they are numerous -- may be the product of the franchise's runaway popularity.
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| Original Score: 2/4
If there's a moral to be gleaned from Spider-Man 3 -- aside from the fact that heavily promoted franchise movies tend to rake in megabucks -- it's this: Movies don't necessarily need to hit grand slams to score.
| Original Score: B
An extravagant three-ring circus of a movie from director Sam Raimi, but it's not without a struggle.
Aesthetically and conceptually wrung out, fizzled rather than fizzy, this latest installment in the spider-bites-boy adventure story shoots high, swings low and every so often hits the sweet spot, but mostly just plods and plods along.
| Original Score: 2/5
The tone is ultimately more subdued than your average superhero movie. Kudos to Raimi for making it feel justified.
Spider-Man 3 is far from a flop, and I'm sure the Spider-maniacs will eat it up. For me, it's a buffet without much aftertaste.
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| Original Score: B-
It's mostly enjoyable. But it's a limping effort compared with the first two. The trilogy hobbles to a finish when it should have soared.
| Original Score: 2.5/4
In an apparent effort to put a stake in the heart of the franchise that threatens to define his career, director Sam Raimi has delivered an overlong, visually incoherent, mean-spirited and often just plain awful Spider-Man 3.
It's odd to think of Spider-Man 2 as a small movie, but next to the clanking, wheezing contraption that is Spider-Man 3, that $784 million-grossing megahit feels like some little Sundance indie.
Spider-Man 3 offers a touching portrait of the need for humility in the face of great success. It's a lesson the creators of this oversized blockbuster-in-waiting might have taken a little more to heart.
At 140 minutes, it's not a difficult movie to sit through. It's just difficult to enjoy.
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| Original Score: 1/4
Maguire has made Peter/Spidey all his own; the supporting characters are marvelous, but it's his brave, soulful work that pulls it all together.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
My guess is that when the summer blockbuster season finishes pummeling us with formula, Spider-Man 3 is going to look like one of the few that was touched by human hands.
| Original Score: 3/4
I liked it. To place a sensitive story in a male-epic genre -- to dramatize feelings of angst and personal betrayal worthy of an Ingmar Bergman film, and then to dress them up in gaudy comic-book colors -- is to pull off a smartly subversive drag show.
This is a wonderfully imagined, heartfelt piece of pop entertainment that soars not only for its spectacular eye candy, but also during the moments when its protagonists simply stand still and talk to each other.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
What's with all the crying? Both heroes and villains shed tears so readily, you almost want to stand up mid-screening and ask director Sam Raimi to stop the projector so everybody can have a group hug.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
The script is busy with so many supporting characters and plot detours that the series' charming idiosyncrasy is sometimes lost in the noise. Fortunately, it's entertaining noise.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The result? Predictably, by the time of the big, swinging-through-the-concrete-canyons climax, we've pretty much lost interest.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
The combat showstoppers, though still too CG to be felt as much as they're admired, should thrill fanboys to no end.
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| Original Score: B
As last year's Bond reboot Casino Royale made obvious, less is the new more. Spider-Man, stop your engines.
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| Original Score: 2/4
What's worse is that after a fairly pedestrian opening, director Sam Raimi loses all control of the film as it rambles from storyline to storyline in search of a center.
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| Original Score: C-
Director Sam Raimi tries to pump some life into this dutiful enterprise but seems more than a little bored himself, especially when he's getting mushy about Spider-Man's moral decline and regeneration.
No one will feel cheated -- the movie isn't a careless cop-out -- but somehow Spidey has gotten tangled up in his overlong, overdone and underthought web.
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| Original Score: C+
Spider-Man 3 kicks off this Summer of Sequels in big, loud, occasionally clever, but more often meandering ways. It's not dull, exactly, but neither is it much fun.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
There are so many super-villains buzzing around like flies in Spider-Man 3 that the web of plots, subplots, flashbacks and unnecessary character amplifications makes it feel more like Spider-Man.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Over-produced, over-publicized, over-designed, over-computerized and just plain over the moon, it's so preposterously overwrought with so many bewildering plots juggling simultaneously for over-emphasis, there's no entry point for criticism.
Spider-Man 3 is product, but it's a machine that tickles your eyes.
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| Original Score: B-
No matter how much it costs and what its flaws, Spider-Man 3 still gets a lot of bang for the buck.
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| Original Score: 4/5
The movie has the curious effect of leaving you over-fulfilled. When it's done, any appetite for another event picture, even one half as well made as this, is temporarily curbed.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Raimi's everything-including-the-kitchen-sink third film robs the Spider-Man movie myth of its lightness. He has taken something heartfelt and witty and reduced it into just another comic-book movie.
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| Original Score: 3/5
It's as if director Sam Raimi felt he had to give us more of everything, and in the process lost sight of what made the first two films so enjoyable.
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| Original Score: 2/4
[Spider-Man 3 has] an ungainly, cumbersome feeling, as if its plot elements were the product of competing contractors who never saw the need to cooperate on a coherent final product.
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| Original Score: 2.5/5
A certain twee anachronism has always been part of the Spider-Man tradition -- ditto dexterous, old-fashioned fun. But this summer's first obligatory blockbuster is all thumbs.
I'll take a wild guess and say that Spidey fans come for the action and, on that count, they will not be disappointed.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
The third adventure of the guy with arachnid superpowers tries gamely, is solidly entertaining and possesses dazzling special effects, but it falls short of the near-perfection of the Spidey sequel.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Three films in, how is New York's premier webmaster holding up? Not badly; not spectacularly.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Spidey the Third feels like an even greater letdown following Spidey Part Deux, which was the rare sequel that surpassed the original.
Laziness mingles with overkill, violence with mawkishness: most of the characters weep at the slightest provocation, but heads are beaten, burned, and sheared off by passing subway trains.
What's missing? Momentum. A touch of meanness. A centrifugal threat like Molina's octopus man. (In terms of dramatic stature, the three villains here don't add up to one Doc Ock.)
Spider-Man 3 is nothing if not eclectic, but somehow this ambitious mishmash works. Action-packed, with all the digital fireworks that a $250 million (or more) budget can buy, it's both the most grandiose chapter and the nuttiest.
It's that willingness to give you more than you expect -- to refuse to settle in and just coast -- that's made the Spider-Man series the great fun it is.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Despite director Sam Raimi's near-desperate determination to top the earlier films and tie up loose ends, he does deliver a handsome product with some spectacular special-effects sequences.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Left dangling for the past three years, arachnophiles everywhere finally have cause to celebrate.
After the significant improvement of the second installment over the first, new entry reps a roughly equivalent dip in quality and enjoyment, with Spidey now giving off the faint odor of running on fumes.
