In the opening credits of "Spider-Man 3," we see crawling across the screen a multi-tentacled, half-organic, half-synthetic, parasitic black goo, which (we later learn) attaches itself to people and brings out their evil side.
That’s a fairly apt metaphor for the movie.
Less a movie, really, than an industrial product for our consumer culture — and weighing in at two hours and 20 minutes — "Spider-Man 3" is a surprisingly unobjectionable action entertainment, as long as you don’t probe too deeply below its $250 million, CGI-coated surface.
Because you won’t find anything there.
Story, characters, acting, and emotions are all banal, no less artificial than the black goo.
But what are they for, except to lull us between eye-popping, computer-generated battle scenes between heroes and villains?
All you really need to know about this movie you learned in kindergarten. There’s a superhero, see? And some other people who are ticked off at him.
There’s the love interest, of course, who knows the superhero’s real identity, and the wizened old relative who’s there to buck up our hero’s spirits when they needed up-bucking.
Thomas Haden Church shows up as a villain, who, through the wonders of modern particle physics, becomes a shape-shifter made of sand.
My, how he’s buff!
And look, he’s vertical, not sideways!
Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker, aka Spiderman (sorry: Spider-Man), has a certain goofy appeal.
And Kirsten Dunst, the love interest, is suitably babelicious in a more or less wholesome way.
The mostly teenage audience enjoyed the occasional bits of humor, and I felt glad for them.
J.K. Simmons, a familiar face from the small screen, has a brief but amusing turn as the hypertensive Perry White character, the big-city editor whose secretary sends an electric jolt to his desk as a reminder to keep his blood pressure in check (not!). And the teens especially liked the scene in which Maguire, in the grip of the goo, appears at a jazz club and makes like a super-charged John Travolta in "Saturday Night Fever."
Whoa!
Did anyone just notice the social equation there? Smoky jazz club with black patrons and break dancing, equals...evil heart, equals...black goo? Where are those black patrons when Maguire returns to the club at movie’s end for his romantic rapprochement?
This is why it’s not always good to look beneath the surface. Let’s just thank Hollywood for keeping the adolescents of America anaesthetized with industrial-strength blockbusters, and move on.
On a final note, I find I do have one objection: A sickening scene in which the corner of a skyscraper gets destroyed by a rogue construction crane.
It’s five-and-a-half years past 9/11.
Can’t directors get this imagery out of their systems? Enough already!
"Spider-Man 3" is rated PG-13, for scenes of intense action violence. It is playing at the Moviehouse in Millerton and the Colonial Theatre in North Canaan.
