Critics are delighted, disappointed, and ultimately divided over this summer’s first heavily-hyped blockbuster, the third instalment in the Spiderman franchise from director Sam Raimi, starring Tobey Maguire.

“It’s an odd response to such a mammoth movie,” muses Ben Walters in Time Out , “but Spider-Man 3 feels a bit like watching a TV season box-set – in a good way. It’s partly the sheer length, partly the well-paced but notably episodic plot, but mostly because it offers the culmination of the cohesive narrative of honesty and betrayal, to oneself and one’s loved ones, that has underscored the whole franchise. It’s an impressive achievement, balancing petty psychological foibles against citywide peril just as the CG mise en scène roves from the molecular to the multi-storey.”

So basically, “this is one huge action vehicle, slamming the accelerator down in pursuit of the Big Thrill,” concludes Jonathan Dean, writing in Total Film. “Keeping track here can be a headache, but at times the breathlessness is exceptional. This is the film the comic-book faithful will lap up, hitting a tone most reminiscent of Stan Lee’s heyday. Sod all the portents; from Parker’s flirtation, to a tongue- firmly-in-cheek cameo from the creator himself, Spider-Man 3 is a blockbuster that knows how to have fun – never more so than with an extended appearance from Evil Dead legend Bruce Campbell. Playing an iffy-accented French waiter, his five-minutes are more Saturday Night Live sketch than summer money-spinner. That such indulgences are to be laughed with, rather than at, is a credit to Raimi’s craft, honed over the course of the three movies.”

It “is nothing if not eclectic, but somehow this ambitious mishmash works” says David Ansen in Newsweek. “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. The juiciest battle here is Spidey vs. Spidey, or, if you prefer, superego vs. id. When Peter starts to go seriously bad, the movie becomes seriously fun. Maguire drops the sweet smile and replaces it with a smug leer: he gives new meaning to the term swinger. Director Sam Raimi, who's always had a taste for loopy comedy (his "Evil Dead" movies are a delirious mix of slime and slapstick), clearly enjoys turning Peter into a wild and crazy guy. He even gives him a dance number in a smoky nightclub that plays like a parody of a '50s gangster musical.”

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

Wesley Morris in the Boston Globe also enjoyed this comic turn, when “Maguire wilds out”. He “wears this new black suit beneath his street clothes like an undershirt. Soon his jeans get a little tighter, his patience a little thinner, and his hair long enough to flip in hilariously cocky irritation. He struts down the streets of Manhattan in a dual state of geeky entitlement and Travoltan bliss while some lite disco-funk plays around him — he’s got night fever.”

“The rest of Spider-Man 3 is an intricately plotted saga which takes our hero from adolescence to adulthood. After six years, the franchise may be familiar, and lucrative, yet it hasn’t curdled into a burdensome series of ones, zeroes, and dollar signs. Raimi, who shares script credit with his brother Ivan and Alvin Sargent, strikes an exquisite balance between pop and woe, drama and whooshing adventure.”

The Times’ Leo Lewis , reviewing the film after its glitzy world premiere in Tokyo last month, calls a spade a spade. Spiderman 3 is, he says, “a daft, highly polished couple of hours of fantasy fun”, plain and simple. But the wild side of Peter Parker didn’t ring true, a sentiment shared by almost every other British reviewer. “The problem is that even Spider-Man’s “evil” side is still hopelessly mild-mannered. We are shown a montage of his sub-Mr Hyde depravities. His hair droops over one eye; he swaggers along the street; he flirts with passers-by; his girl ditches him; and he makes an ass of himself in a nightclub. In short, he behaves like a textbook drunk on any given Saturday night. A horrifying glimpse into the unspeakable pit of the human soul this is not.”

Lewis awarded the film a modest three stars, while Times chief film critic James Christopher, writing on the eve of the its UK release, was even less enamoured. The film was “starved of a single ounce of drama”, he says, ending up as little more than “a fairground ride”.

Meanwhile Chris Hewitt in Empire was almost naively optimistic about the third instalment in the comic book trilogy. “The Spider-Man franchise had all the potential in the world to become that great trilogy,” he says. “With Sam Raimi at the helm the first two films triumphed at the box office and, more importantly, were crackers. So it’s a shame to report that, while Spider-Man 3 is a consistently enjoyable start to the summer silly season, it more pings off the post than completes the hat-trick.”

So what was to blame? “One of Raimi’s most admirable traits throughout the series to date has been his refusal to pit his protagonist against multiple villains, thus avoiding the unfocused fate of, say, Batman Forever, in which the title character essentially cameoed in his own movie. In Spider-Man 3, however, Raimi breaks his own rules, racking up not one, not two, but THREE different nemeses (four, if you count the enemy within) for our friendly neighbourhood whatsit to contend with. And while the broth isn’t spoiled by the presence of too many cooks — there's too much giddy entertainment here for that — it sure tasted a lot better with just a spider in our soup.”

Anthony Lane in the New Yorker must have missed the giddy bits, deciding that there was just one great scene in the Spiderman 3, and “you can pretty much leave the theatre once it’s over, but for those three or four minutes you wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. An escaped convict named Flint Marko (Thomas Haden Church) flees the New York City police and tumbles, as you do, into a Particle Physics Test Facility. He finds himself in a sandpit, subjected to what we are told is “demolecularization,” a process familiar to anyone who pounds crackers to make a cheesecake crust. Once the experiment is over, the sand lies still; then it stirs and heaves, and, like a crumbling Lazarus, Marko rises again, his legs sifting and scattering with the effort. Finally, he staggers upright to reveal his transfigured self: Sandman, his flesh and blood blown away for good, and an odd look—part mourning, part implacable resolve—dimly discernible on his granular face. From here on, he will be storming dust, a wondrous mixture of the quick and the dead.”

But one great scene does not a blockbuster make, and “if Spider-Man 3 is a shambles,” says Lane, “that’s because it makes the rules up as it goes along. By the end, for instance, Sandman has become the size of an office block, each swinging fist as big as a truck, his personality reduced to brutishness. I half expected him to come after Spider-Man and Mary Jane carrying a gigantic bucket and spade. By what criterion did he grow so mountainous? Is he like a Transformer, or more like a genie? The fact is that if the fantastical is to flourish it must lay down the conditions of its magic and abide by them; otherwise, we feel cheated.” In other words, you’ve got to have rules.

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