The devil in Peter Parker

[May 2nd, 2007] Peter Parker's nemesis begs for mercy. Pinned against a wall, the Spider-Man 3 villain pleads for another chance. "You want forgiveness?" Tobey Maguire growls. "Get religion."

The signs are clear: This is the revenge of our hero—and director Sam Raimi—on all the people who confused Spider-Man with Jesus. There were quite a few. On the release of the last Spidey installment, Time magazine (among other publications) heralded the movie with the headline "The Gospel According to Spider-Man." St. Peter of the Comics was bruised for our iniquities, he was martyred for his dual nature, and he was discussed in Sunday school. No wonder he's ready to get nasty.

Not that he gets all that nasty. On page and screen, Peter Parker has always been the nerd made good. Offered the chance to dim that halo—thanks to an inflated ego, a somewhat foreseeable betrayal, and an oily goop from outer space—he begins to comb his bangs over his forehead, don black dress shirts, and crush his competitors. This is, you will agree, a comparatively mild corruption. When Anakin Skywalker goes bad, he turns into Darth Vader. When Spider-Man goes bad, he turns into Bill Gates.

I'm not complaining. A genial warmth has been a virtue of the Spider-Man franchise since Raimi and Maguire took it on, and this effort is as highflying a skylark as any of them. None of the action sequences is as immediate or memorable as the el-train episode in the second movie, but if we must settle for less, at least that includes vertiginous aerial battles between falling chunks of state-of-the-art CGI.

We do not have to settle for a smaller portion of villains, however. There are three this time around (not counting Bad Peter), and large swaths of the movie are taken up with establishing their histories. Foremost is Harry Osborne, the New Goblin (James Franco), who has been positioned as Spidey's friend and foil since his dad, the Green Goblin, met an untimely death by flying surfboard. Franco has been stuck pouting since that first-movie funeral, and only now does a knock on the head present the actor with a chance to show his range and charm. All of Spider-Man 3's most delightful moments belong to Franco; while Tobey Maguire is gloating and strutting, his counterpart is stealing the movie (and Kirsten Dunst's Mary Jane) with a lopsided grin and some Chubby Checker moves.

That would be quite enough plot for Spider-Man 3, actually, but Raimi tosses in two more heavies, Sandman (Thomas Haden Church) and Venom (Topher Grace), and spends a great deal of time understanding their plights. So much time, in fact, that when the movie reaches its two-hour mark, the main tensions between Peter and Mary Jane (who is understandably put off by her boyfriend turning into an angry beat poet) are simply abandoned. Spider-Man 3 is a worthy addition, but it is packed with too many elements, and not enough of the ones we want to see. It is good that Peter Parker should love his enemies. But maybe not so much.