Venom, Sand, Crap.

Last week, Housemate and myself decided on a long overdue movie day. As I had a Tuesday off, we could nicely schedule in one or two movies for our customary Sneak. A plan was made, refreshments were purchased, and off we went.

The first movie, Blades of Glory, I’d already seen, and reasonably enjoyed despite a tremendous hatred for Will Ferrel. Still, the movie is exactly as one can expect of it, and this is not always a bad thing.
The third movie, the sneakly previewed one, was the movie Black Snake Moan, a surprisingly interesting movie about a town slut and a good Christian. This is a movie I would recommend to almost everybody, but it must be said that part of my reasoning here is a liking of Christina Ricci, who may have had her least Ricci-like role in this little flick.

But the second movie of the day is what we need to talk about here. Need? Yes. Need. After all, sometimes a movie so heinously uninteresting, so laissez fairly acted, so badly scripted and so uninspired in it’s direction and plot that upcoming moviegoers need to be protected from it with all summonable power and tranquilizers.

Which movie?
Spiderman 3.

The movie itself is almost al that could be expected, there are disasters, there are colourful villains who have outlandish powers to counteract the enlarged spideryness of the main character, there are daring rescues and some easily contrived backstories. So far, so reasonable. Nothing we didn’t see in the first two movies.
So what was there that we in fact did not see in the first two movies that we saw now and that propelled this movie into the higher stratospheres of utter and complete crap? I hear you ask this, and as luck would have it, I am well prepared and gearing to answer.

And where to start? Luckily, this movie had a good number of “those moments”. Unluckily, one has to almost relive them to find a good starting point.
What are “those moments”? Those are the exact moments in any film where you realize that impaling yourself on a beverage holder or checking whether it is really possible to gouge through your wrists with an empty crisp packet is preferable to continuing with watching a childhood favourite be bloodily raped in the ear.
And it is also the exact moment where you realize you can’t stop watching, for you might miss the redeeming qualities.
Not that there are very many, if any, in this steaming pile of offal that calls itself a film-reel.

There are a number of reasonable flaws one can mention. The fact that an escaped criminal can get away from policemen with dogs and guns on an open field? Unlikely, but artistic license. The fact that that same escaped criminal can stumble into an open pit thus eluding his would be captors? Yes, sure.
But at the moment where that same pit is the location of a particle physics testing facility where nobody notices that a good sized man has stumbled into what holds their presumably fragile and incredibly expensive testing machinery one has to realize one has inadvertently stumbled into something smelly…
To add insult to injury, the mention that the readings from within the pit o’ expensiveness where off was greeted by one of the scientists with the explanation that it was most likely a bird flown into the pit, which apparently happens often in these environments.

Two things:
1)If you are doing some carefully monitored research on something like particle physics, would you then not prefer to do so in an environment that has, among other things, a reasonable unlikelyhood of birds flying into your testing radius?
2) A bird with roughly the size and weight of a full grown man is a common occurrence?

But still, mister-escaped-convict has fallen into the sand, and for some odd reason a little bit of sand gets stuck in a little bit of his DNA and he turns into sand. I know this is roughly Spiderman canon and I should not say anything, but seriously. Sand. DNA.
In Jurassic Park, parts of amphibian DNA were used to splice together the DNA of dinosaurs from the blood sucked up by prehistoric mosquitoes. The dinosaurs then had some characteristics of the species that provided the splicing materials. This is far fetched, but ok.
SAND has NO DNA. I have eaten a good deal of sand in my life, working up to my bushel, and not yet have I been even able to turn into an enourmous sand-creature, and not for lack of trying, I might add. And for everyone who now wants to say something about nuclear physics, wave theories and the assumption of characteristics through insertion of alien objects: Shut up or I will arrange for some insertion, ok? This did not make sense.

The fact that the weight of roughly a man then walked out of the research environment in the shape of sand also makes little sense, but these scientist obviously had their funding set for years to come, so what do they care.

From here on in, the stupidity gets worse and worse. Letting canon and the inherent bad logic of a creature made of sand lie, as it really wasn’t what crappified this movie, there is more.

This movie introduces Venom. Starting as a black and gooey alien lifeform, Venom quickly morphs into an alternative Spidey suit. As such, it enhances the emotions and powers of its wearer. What it also does, it makes mild mannered reporters absolutely gross dickheads.
I think I need to scrub my retinas with a mixture of bleach and steel wool to get the image of the incredibly emo-looking Maguire strutting his stuff down the streets of New York from off my memory, but at least almost everybody in the movie responds to him with the same unhidden and great loathing I did, so I felt at least roughly justified during this little bit of the movie.
Another thing that Venom does, multifunctional as it is, is turn you into the Son of Mask, as was evidenced by the frankly embarrassing piano and dance number performed midway through this movie. The fact that Peter Parker ends this scene with a good hammering of the ever whiney Mary Jane is obviously not OK, but was more pleasing than anything else the movie offered, and all those who know how I think about slapping the little lady around would know what that says about the rest of the movie.

Coincidentally, the rapid mental decline of Aunt May is beautifully illustrated by her first reaction to her nephew telling her he hurt the love of his life, as she says the hardest thing here is to learn to forgive oneself.
This met with such an almost uncontrollable fit of laughter from Housemate and myself that we felt the need to turn it into a coughing fit lest we’d be forcibly ejected from the movie, but it must be said here that the hardest thing is in fact NOT forgiving oneself, but rather owning up to the dickhead one has become and asking forgiveness from the person one has slapped around a drinking establishment.

During all this strutting and slapping and badly dubbed piano-playing there is the umpteenth try to resurrect the long dead love triangle between MJ, Peter and, euhm… Harry? Bob? Tracy? Played by James Franco, the character of “the other guy” is so unremarkable and so dreadfully unnecessary that it becomes difficult to remember anything he really says. Which is odd, cause the guy’s only function in the movie is to be cuter than Spiderman himself.
In this instalment he apparently gets amnesia from being repeatedly being banged into a wall. Well, fair enough, he gets a beating that would get most people a good dose of death, so he gets off lightly, I guess. Plus, he gets to be in a hospital gown that very nicely shows off some shapely pecs and a good nipple, so who is worrying.
The amnesia gives us a stupid subplot that ends up literally nowhere but in a vengeance fuelled bit of overacting, like, you know, the last movie.
So, to recap, (H)arry thinks (P)eter, as Spiderman, killed his dad and wants revenge. The fact that his dad was a supercriminal does not really factor here, blood being thicker than intelligence and all that, but still.
H uses Dad’s equipment to attack P, loses, gets amnesia, remembers, attacks again, gets maimed, wants to attack yet again, when this movie starts delivering it’s kicks to internal consistency with renewed vigour.
It is at that moment that the butler, of all people, decides to put an end to all this senseless exploding and webbing, by giving us a bit of information that one the one hand would’ve been handy a few movies earlier, and on the other hand is so blatantly and stupidly untrue that all those who believe in the old “is truth beauty, is beauty truth” adage would be well forced to take their own life in absolute terror.

The line? “I bandaged your fathers wound when he lay dying, and they were self inflicted, nobody killed your father” or something of that ilk.
A few things:
1) We had just had a flashback to H cradling his dying father in his arms. So the butler was doing his bandaging at that very moment? No he wasn’t, we and H would have remembered.
2) H’s dad did indeed die of a series of events he had himself set into motion, but Spiderman did have a great hand in this. As I recall, grievous internal damage was the real killer here, which Daddy-H got in a fight with the arachnoid.
3) The butler could possibly have told this to the young ward before all the rampage, since he knows apparently all that goes on in the house. The fact that the very pretty H is by now a good look-a-like to a certain organ playing genius in the bowels of the Paris’ sewer, it would have been welcome information.

I am going to finish this rant pretty soon, but not before regaling to you the absolute coup de grace for the dignity of this film… The American Flag.

At one point, Spidey, on his way to erscue his girlfriend, stops for a goodly length of time to pose heroically in front of a crappily CGI’d image of the good old red white and blue.
It was at this point that Housemate and I chorused a few lines of “Oh Goden this is too cheap” and the movie took it’s final plummet to a future of alcoholism, pain and dejection.

Caveat Emptor, moviegoers.

Strips at Caveat,

Kevin.