Read what Leo Lewis had to say after he saw Spider-Man 3's Tokyo premiere

Certificate 12A, 140mins

You will not be able to move this summer without being assaulted by the images and battered by the merchandise. The biggest film of the year opens tomorrow and it’s a towering disappointment. Spider-Man 3 cost a staggering quarter of a billion dollars to assemble. But I’d be surprised if the script set the producers back much more than a fiver and a bag of cinnamon balls. Sam Raimi’s sequel is stuffed with promising plot lines, bionic new villains, expensive stunts and dazzling special effects. But it is starved of a single ounce of drama. Why do so many of the biggest franchises fail to deliver at the third time of asking?

BACKGROUND

• Spider-Man 3

• Spider-Man 3 - Tokyo premiere

• Shock revelation: why Spider-Man’s real name isn’t Peter Parkour

• Spider-Man 3 slams the accelerator down in pursuit of the Big Thrill

• Spider-Man climbs up to challenge Titanic

BACKGROUND

• Spider-Man 2

• Bad things come in threes

The quiet American

He's a superhero and drop-dead goodlooking, but Tobey Maguire is no troublemaker

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

Partly it’s box office pressure. With such a huge budget the expectations are unrealistically high. Aiming to shift over $400 million in tickets, Raimi has opted to turn Spider-Man 3 into a fairground ride. It’s a shame. What distinguishes the first two parts of the Marvel Comics franchise is that, despite the cartoon lunacy of the villains, they are undone by tragic human flaws. Alfred Molina’s seminal performance as Doc Ock still brings a tear to the eye. In Spider-Man 3, Raimi attempts to explore Spider-Man’s dark side, but ends up turning this spicy proposition into a medley of stunts.

Life is perfectly peachy for Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) at the start of the film. He’s top of his science class in college. His alter ego Spider-Man is the toast of the town. His freelance photographs grace the front page of the Daily Bugle. And he’s on the verge of proposing to Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst). The couple are kissing under the stars when a red-hot meteorite lands next to them and squirts out a gooey black alien parasite that transforms Parker from his usual nerdy self into a first-class jerk. His Spider-Man costume turns charcoal black and he suddenly feels the urge to please himself.

Needless to say, M. J. is horrified by Parker’s new Hitler hairstyle, perky new girlfriend (Dallas Bryce Howard) and rampant sexual arrogance. You could almost forgive the preposterous coincidence that of all the people the gunk might have landed on, it had to be Spider-Man, if Parker’s dark side wasn’t so inadvertently comical and reminiscent of John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.

Little wonder that the film suffers a crisis of confidence. Raimi betrays his lack of nerve by introducing a succession of super-villains whose unrelated stories are nominally linked by a shared hatred of Spider-Man. Thomas Hayden Church’s doomy jail-breaker is the best of these hard-luck stories. He keeps getting clobbered by our hero while trying to steal sacks of cash for his terminally ill young daughter. One night he falls into a bunker in Central Park where nuclear physicists happen to be experimenting on a sandpit.

Naturally, he turns into the Sandman: a creation inspired by the Egyptian high priest Imhotep in The Mummy. He is not good around puddles.

An ambitious paparazzo (Topher Grace) is transformed into a toothy fish called Venom when Parker gets him sacked from the Bugle and then accidentally infects him with the alien parasite in a Catholic church.

And the fabulously rich and dashing Harry Osborn (James Franco) – one-time best friend of Parker and Mary Jane – returns to avenge his Green Goblin father (Willem Dafoe) who Spider-Man famously vanquished in part one.

You can’t help feeling that the three monsters must have far more interesting things to do, such as knitting jock-straps or conquering the world. Parker feels the need to save them from themselves, if, of course, he can save himself. An endless medley of fairground fights does nothing to endear us to a single character. They hurl brick walls at each other. They continue trying to clobber the daylights out of their opponent even as they tumble down the face of skyscrapers to almost certain doom. They ventilate office blocks by using Spider-Man’s head as a wrecking ball.

This incessant Tom and Jerry action makes it impossible to actually care. The Sunday School morality, and the inevitable flash of the American flag, are perfectly irritating. It’s extraordinary how often the third movie of a tent-pole franchise fails to deliver, in this case by trying to deliver too much. It’s hardly the kiss of death for Raimi, but with a budget as huge as his the pressure is surely on to pull in more than $400 million.

Do you agree with James Christopher's verdict? Read what Leo Lewis had to say after he saw the film's Tokyo premiere

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