It's hard for me at this point to look at the Spider-Man franchise literally. Literally, after all, it's riddled with inconsistencies, plot holes the size of Buicks, abrupt shifts in tone, important subplots given short shrift, and on and on. But as iconography, as allegory (who can forget the timeliness of the first film's 9/11 parable?), as an essentially self-aware product of our image-ravenous culture, it achieves a kind of spectral, magical grace. Though I prefer the personal evolution of the second picture (and the third Harry Potter film for the same reasons), the trying-on and jettisoning of father figures along the path of boy-into-man, there are moments in Spider-Man 3 so supremely well-crafted as visual poetry, so gloriously tangled and knotty, that they batter defenses raised against another Iraq War tale of unimaginable losses and the cold comfort of vengeance. The whole of the film is a case of rolling with the punches, really, of choosing early whether to hang with director Sam Raimi's sense of broad slapstick melodrama and greeting-card symbolism or reject it as incoherent, populist mugging. If you accept its roundhouse swings and Evil Dead-era zooms at face value, though, it has for you in return a moment where something struggles to be born, but can only finish its naissance with the help of an image of its sick daughter; a breathless action sequence that revolves around the recovery of a sentimental artifact; and, as a bonus, a "Three Stooges" bit where old pal Bruce Campbell plays an unctuous, over-eager maître d'.

Look at the picture as a passion play and find nerd hero Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) and his Broadway baby girlfriend Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) coping in different ways with their paths to personal glory and its attendant self-confidence. Their friend Harry (James Franco), the emotional lightning rod for the film's climactic battle, is having a hard time dealing with the death of his father, just as Peter's having a tough time dealing with the loss of his surrogate father/s. The superstar villains this time around are Flint Marko (Thomas Haden Church)--who nets a grisly demise and resurrection in a particle accelerator in scenes of surprising pathos that, alone, justify the film's rumoured budget--and alien symbiote Venom (Topher Grace), another fluid, liquid baddie that slimes along where Marko's Sandman alter-ego rustles and flows. Venom enhances Peter's aggression: his need for vengeance, addressed briefly in the first instalment, flowers here as that war between Peter's iconic better nature, flash-frozen against Old Glory, becomes literal in antagonists made of misdirected rage (and looking, as it happens, like a sentient oil slick--Venom and Sandman: oil and sand).

A lot like The Bourne Supremacy, Spider-Man 3 is that extraordinary mainstream action picture that feminizes its man-of-action before allowing all roads to end with forgiveness and regret. Where the second film closed with the promise of Peter's successful matriculation into adulthood in a place of his own, with a girl at his side and wedding bells on the soundtrack, this picture, like the first, concludes at a cemetery in the rain. The church bell in Spider-Man 3, following a terse exchange in which a changed Parker advises a romantic adversary that if he's looking for forgiveness, "find religion," takes centre stage in a belfry as Parker undergoes another of the picture's deaths and rebirths. And it predicts yet another transformation (Harry's) in a long baptismal shower.

Of the three pictures, this is the most emotionally sadistic, ranging from a sick girl who gives the Marko character (and Church is fantastic) the depth that should have attended the Batman franchise's Mr. Freeze to the severe wounding of a good friend. Parker, mutated by rage, even brutalizes Mary Jane in a difficult sequence that has Raimi juggling his natural instinct for pratfalls and embarrassment with the Raimi who addressed in A Simple Plan the decomposition of love and trust. Where Spider-Man 3 is weakest is when it's lightest-hearted (when Parker, for instance, transforms himself with some eye-shadow and bangs and turns heads for the wrong reasons in a jaunty, James Brown-scored stroll down the street) and when it tries too hard to make a lot of sense. What saves the enterprise, admittedly the sloppiest instalment of the trilogy, is its moral centre: there are consequences in this universe; every action has a reaction, and every chain of events has a serious fallout.

I noted more civilian casualties in this episode than in the previous ones--with Spider-Man shown to be far from omnipotent in preventing collateral damage in his battles with the world's industrial freaks--as well as the ultimate message that while the United States is ruined at this moment by ill-spent bile and astonishingly bad choices, these criminal missteps are out of character with our better intentions. Spider-Man 3, and it's not subtle in the slightest, is about making choices, making mistakes, and making amends. Say what you will about its set-pieces (the worst here, aesthetically and technically, of any in the series) and the CGI (still cheesy), this series has more on its mind than its bells and whistles--explanation in part for the extended periods of quiet throughout. It believes that genre pictures have a responsibility to both their fan contingent and to the culture at large--and that this hero remains an effective modern avatar to fight, or embrace, shadows popular and personal. For its popularity and intelligence, its clear-eyed optimism and unabashed sentimentality, the Spider-Man saga could well become the best time capsule of the place and character of our nation.-Walter Chaw

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Published: May 4, 2007