Midnight madness: Spider-Man 3

Before I start tearing into this latest installment of the adventures of your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man and incur the wrath of all those who enjoyed it, let me just state for the record that I didn't hate this movie. Not by a long stretch.

If it weren't such a beloved franchise to me, in fact, I'd probably be writing a much more positive review. Call me a victim of my own expectations, compounded by my strategy of watching the first two Spider-Man movies to keep me awake and alert two hours past my regular bedtime so I could join the younguns for this late-night screening. That only made Sam Raimi's latest flick pale in comparison to the others.

Flash back with me, if you will, to the end of Spider-Man 2, which is my favorite superhero movie of all time (the best villian, the epic love story, what more could you want?) Near the end of this great flick, we see James Franco's Harry Osborn vowing revenge on Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker for killing his father (if you haven't seen No. 2 yet, please forgive me, but how could you not have?) It sets up a perfect journey from there to redemption, a sideways view of a hero's quest, which No. 3 only sort of follows through on.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Shortly after the movie opens we see Harry on his Goblin glider, which appears to be more of a snowboard, and a nifty chase ensues. In pursuit of Spidey/Peter, he bumps his head and loses his memory, so far a perfect setup. It's in how Raimi (and not one but two of his brothers credited with the story) deal with the issues this brings up where the movie loses focus.

Just as Harry loses his memory, our hero Peter gets infected with the venom (which comes from outer space, oddly enough) that brings out his dark side. Except, for my taste at least, it's not nearly dark enough. The main side effects seem to be that it makes our hero comb his hair more than a little like Hitler, dress like a disco dancer and thrust his pelvis at random women on the street. Some of this was funny, but more often than not it was just painful to watch.

But how could I forget Kirsten Dunst's MJ, since, as Peter Parker told us way back when, this is really a story about a girl? The Raimis, oddly enough for a superhero movie, clearly invested the most time into her storyline, and Dunst fares better than Maguire with it. They still work well together on screen, but she has the upper hand as MJ deals with being fired from her Broadway show and myriad other troubles (but, please, don't let her sing again, and so definitely don't let her play Deborah Harry!)

There are two other villains in this piece, and one too many. Though he plays it with relish, Topher Grace as the embodiment of Venom was just thoroughly irrelevent. Thomas Haden Church's Flint Marko was also woefully underdeveloped, but it was awfully cool to watch him transform into the Sandman. The two of them mostly just distract from the dual journeys of Harry and Peter, which should have formed more of the foundation for this flick.

OK, so I said at the outset that I didn't hate the movie. What did I like? The continuity between the three flicks is impressive. No detail is left hanging, and it's good to see our old friends again, even if they're not nearly as well written this time around.

And the last 20 minutes, really the only epic action sequence in the piece, is almost worth sitting through the 2 hours that came before it. It's nothing to approach the sequences with Alfred Molina's Doc Ock, still the best work Raimi has ever done for my money, but it's well-choreographed action on an epic scale. And finally, Bruce Campbell, of course, just chews up his 10 minutes as an extremely snooty "French" waiter.

In comparison to its two predecessors, I'd have to call "Spider-Man 3" a mild failure, but nothing approaching the one-two-three punch of "Poseidon," "X-3" and "Art School Confidential" that launched last summer. That unholy trio just made my eyes bleed.

P.S. I encourage anyone to disagree with me on this, but please be kind in doing so and take into account that it is currently a quarter to 4 in the morning. I wanted to get this out quickly, but now I must get a few hours of sleep before the daily grind starts anew.