Spider-Man 3

It was Sam Raimi and Spider-Man who successfully brought a lone comic book hero to the big screen. More than Donner's Superman, more than Milius's Conan the Barbarian, more than Burton's Batman, Raimi's Spider-Man was the perfect translation of comic book to big screen. His achievement was only matched by Bryan Singer's X-Men, which had an entire crew of superheroes.

Raimi then did the incredible: He topped himself with a sequel, Spider-Man 2 (much as Singer did for himself with X2). Sequels, by definition, are never better than the original. And yet that's exactly what Spider-Man 2 was.

Alas, lightning does not strike twice. Spider-Man 3 isn't horrible, but it comes close. It is horribly disappointing. X3 had the excuse of being turned over to a hack director. Spidey 3 is just Raimi reaching a villain too far.

The plot goes something like this: Parker has become content with his dual nature and has come to love the adulation the city gives his Spider-Man alter ego. He plans on proposing to MJ. MJ, meanwhile, has a theatrical career which is tanking, something Parker is oblivious to. Meanwhile, we learn who really killed Uncle Ben. Meanwhile, that guy, while escaping from the police, stumbles into a random nuclear particle generator and is transformed into the Sandman. Meanwhile, Harry has decided enough is enough and is coming after Spider-Man as Green Goblin Jr. Meanwhile, an arrogant prick photographer is trying to horn in on Parker's territory. Meanwhile, the chief of police's daughter is alluring. Meanwhile, a meteorite falls to earth and a semi-intelligent, belligerent goo wanders about looking for someone it can transform into Venom.

I think that's all, or least the ones I can remember. These are all the starting points for plot threads. Each thread develops threads. Most go absolutely nowhere. They don't even make a nice, tangled weave. They look more like a hairball.

In case you lost count, the film ends up with three villains, and that's at least two too many. Now, without giving too much away, there's some wobble with one of the villains, so that leaves one who is completely useless, and that would be Sandman. He owes his existence to a terrible decision to rewrite history from the first film, namely the murder of Uncle Ben. Bad, bad, bad, bad and pointless move. From there, he's simply pointless in the film. Any lesson or point he might have had in the film to make has either already been made in Spidey 1 and 2, or is made in other ways within Spidey 3.

Remove Sandman and an overly long film tightens up all around. The immediacy of the climactic battle would have been better, and there would have been one less ending in a film that is exceeded only by Return of the King in having ending after ending after ending after... (Honest, people kept getting up, thinking the film was finally over, only to be surprised that it was doing an Energizer Bunny on them.)

Removing Sandman and correcting a "the butler did it" moment would have made this a decent-if-not-great capper to the Spider-Man trilogy. It has other issues. The action sequences are marvels to behold, but they suffer from Lucasitis, the digital filmmaker's driving need to do all sorts of impossible things with the camera POV. Not incredible, mind you, impossible. Problem is that they are so obviously impossible that they yank the audience out of the film as we realize it's all done in a computer. (This, in case you don't realize it, is A Bad Thing.)

Spider-Man 3 made a ton of cash its opening weekend. If it crashes 60% for its second weekend -- normally a horrifying thing -- it'll still set box office records. I expect that kind of crash, though, because the word of mouth around here isn't good.

It's important to remember that the bar here was set by Raimi himself. He made a pair of great Spider-Man films. He then made a set of bad decisions in an effort to top himself. Luckily, this might have been his last Spidey film, which means he can pick a different project for his next film. Which means he can again make me cheer.