Cardboard Boxer Is A Masterpiece Of Everyday Tragedy.

The Good: Amazing performance by Thomas Hayden Church, Great direction, Decent character, Tone
The Bad: Embodies a strong sense of reality without theme or catharsis, Supporting characters are ill-defined.
The Basics: Thomas Hayden Church rules the screen with the understated epic of homelessness in America: Cardboard Boxer.


In modern American culture, there are few more monstrous constructs as bum fighting. Years ago, shows like American Dad! woke viewers up to the concept of bum fights. Rich, predominantly white, young people would hire homeless people to fight for their amusement and ridiculously small sums of money. The social and economic problems of homelessness and poor health care for the mentally ill have not dissipated and, sadly, neither has the reality that people with money continue to use the poor for their own craven desires, including bum fights. As Oscar Pandering Season hits its stride, one indie film is exploring the ugly phenomenon of bum fights. The movie is Cardboard Boxer what it lacks in duration and celebrity power, it makes up for in social message, direction and acting quality.

Arguably the last great movie that bothered to explore homeless issues was The Soloist (reviewed here!). Cardboard Boxer replaces Robert Downey Jr. with Thomas Hayden Church and Jamie Foxx with Terence Howard for star power, but Knate Lee's film is less about flash and more about substance. Cardboard Boxer is bleak and depressing, exactly as one might expect from a film about homelessness and exploitation. Writer and director Knate Lee does not strive to make a flashy movie and he succeeds; by the time Thomas Hayden Church as Willie delivers the line "I don't want to die alone," the viewer is thoroughly depressed.

Willie is a homeless man, living on the streets of Los Angeles, where there are people who go out of their way to ransack the homeless people in alleyways. After the latest attack, Pope - a man who formerly lived on the streets and now drives a cab - comes through and promises to look into the incident, loaning Willie a blanket to replace his stolen one. While dumpster diving, Willie finds a girl's diary and he uses what money he has to buy flashcards so he can learn how to read cursive handwriting to read the diary.

One night, some rich white kids roll into the neighborhood offer the clearly mentally ill brute Skillet $50 to fight anyone who will step up. Willie approaches the car, is attacked and knocks Skillet out, while J.J. and his friend film it. Willie uses the money to get a motel room for the night, where he cleans up, eats and watches television. Willie tries to help out a war veteran and a dog, but is frequently abandoned - though he helps Willie clean up one night by writing him a new sign. As time goes on and Willie continues to feel more and more despondent, J.J. brings an audience into the slum to pay Willie to fight for his amusement and that of his friends. When Skillet walks upon one of the fights, tragedy ensues.

Cardboard Boxer is a brilliant character study, even if it is a homogeneously depressing exploration of human sadness. While bum fights pop back up in the narrative, Cardboard Boxer is such an intense study of Willie and the war veteran Pinky that by the time J.J. returns to the film, the viewer has pretty much forgotten about the first fight.

Willie might well be Thomas Hayden Church's greatest on-screen role. In Cardboard Boxer, Church most frequently plays opposite a partially-burned diary accompanied by his own voiceovers. It's a tough thing to make that watchable; Church makes it riveting. Thomas Haden Church embodies Willie with minimal ticks and no flair, which nails home Knate Lee's point that Willie is like everyone who watches the film at the basic human level. Cardboard Boxer has Church working without his trademark smirk, scowling and mumbling through the role of Willie with heartbreaking precision. It is a shame that Cardboard Boxer will not draw enough attention in cinemas to get Church a much-deserved Oscar nomination.

Terrence Howard is vastly underused in the role of Pope and while Boyd Holbrook is good as Pinky, the role of Pinky is more a statement on the deplorable conditions war veterans suffer than a well-rounded, actualized character. Rhys Wakefield plays J.J. with an appropriately monstrous arrogance, but the role is basically a generic villain without any real subtlety or depth.

Cardboard Boxer is unrelenting in its tone and sense of realism and Knate Lee smartly minimizes the use of soundtrack in the film. Lee creates a film that is both beautiful and heartbreaking with Cardboard Boxer and I cannot recall a film in recent memory where a single shot truly stood out, like a powerful and memorable photograph; Cardboard Boxer has that in a shot of Willie in profile at a burn barrel fire after Pinky has abandoned him.

While Cardboard Boxer is supposed to lack flair to capture a sense of realism and tragedy, the film is unrelenting (just as life on the streets, homeless, is). But because there are no themes and no solutions within Cardboard Boxer, there is minimal entertainment value in the film. Cardboard Boxer is not intended to entertain, but rather educate, but I'm not sure who the intended audience is. Virtually everyone knows about homelessness and poverty as problems in the United States and the world, but most people are unable to personally tackle those problems themselves.

Knate Lee and Thomas Hayden Church are successful with Cardboard Boxer in getting viewers to stop and consider the desperate human cost behind poverty, homelessness, and exploitation, even if the film is unlikely to lead to any form of change.

For other movies currently in theaters, please check out my reviews of:
Other People
Zoom
Spaceman
The Whole Truth
Pete's Dragon
Suicide Squad
Nerve

7/10

For other movie reviews, please check out my Film Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2016 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Not Quite Smart Enough, Smart People Is A Lame Vision Of Miserable People

The Good: Good cast utilized fairly well, Moments of risk taking
The Bad: Woefully misrepresents people of intellect, Nothing exciting in bonus features, Moments of poor editing.
The Basics: When Lawrence Wetherhold begins dating and trying to take over the English department at the college he works at, the viewer discovers even the "smartest" people may be idiots.


Let's talk about stereotypes. Stereotypes are based upon prejudice and misinformation, judging entire groups based upon a limited idea of a very limited number of people from that group. Almost all the time, stereotypes are prejudicial and derogatory and are fairly transparent for what they are. So, for example, if someone were to characterize a black man as virile, watermelon-eating, fast-running illiterate, virtually everyone reading such a statement would recognize it as a series of stereotypes and it would likely reflect worse upon the person making such generalizations than upon the character in question.

Why, then, does our society consistently devalue people of intelligence and articulation and stereotype them? There seems to be a pretty fair open season on intellectuals where they are characterized as asocial, pompous jerks who are utterly incapable of getting along with another human being. They are characterized as intelligent in a test-taking way, but completely idiotic when it comes to interacting with people. Nowhere in my recent experiences has this been more true than in the film Smart People. Smart People stands as a monument to the viewpoint lauded and celebrated by people who are afraid of and prejudiced against people of intelligence.

Lawrence Wetherhold is a quiet English professor who is struggling to get a book published, raise his daughter and find some measure of peace in a world that seems content to surround him with obstacles he does not quite understand. Thwarted by a disgruntled student working the campus impound lot, Lawrence is wounded when he falls over the impound lot fence and finds himself in the care of another former student, Dr. Janet Hartigan. Unable to drive for six months, Lawrence turns to his slacker brother, Chuck, for help.

While Vanessa - Lawrence's daughter - makes moves on her adopted uncle, Lawrence begins dating Janet, who used to have a crush on him when she was a student. Unfortunately, Janet discovers Lawrence is a painful bore who has little going for him and as she works to extricate herself from a relationship with him, Lawrence resolves to become more accessible. In addition to allowing an editor to hatchet his book, he begins to pursue the position of chair of the English department, along the way discovering he is a truly miserable human being.

It is a rare thing for me to sit and enjoy a movie where the characters are almost universally miserable and in that regard, Smart People is most like Friends With Money (reviewed here!) in terms of its tone. It is fairly consistent in its oppressive mood where Lawrence mopes through his day. Like Friends With Money, there is little catharsis and it is hard to muster up a lot of empathy for most of the characters.

This might be even more true because the title of Smart People is woefully misleading. Outside Janet, none of the characters seem exceptionally intelligent. Instead, Lawrence seems to be bluffing his way through academia, Vanessa is snotty with few actual displays of intelligence (though she does get a 1600 on her SATs and manages to get into Stanford), and even Janet is so ridiculously out of touch with her emotional self that she altered her entire life over a paper that Wetherhold gave her a C on. The two black sheep of the family, neglected son James and the incompetent businessman Chuck, are given the trappings of greater intelligence in this skewed stereotype. So, for example, James - who is characterized by the other members of the family as the dim one - gets a poem published in The New Yorker. And Chuck, who drinks, gets Vanessa drunk and is so slovenly he never manages to show up for an appointment on time, is the family liberal. Only in the mind of one so grossly prejudiced against intelligencia would these traits be construed as the trappings of being smart. It does not require much in the way of deconstructing Smart People to realize that this film has an absolute disdain for the appearance of intellect.

Unfortunately, any sense of satire that might come from the presentation of Janet and the Wetherholds is undermined by the fact that anyone who has ever been around anyone of genuine intelligence will see this as a weak collection of obvious stereotypes. In other words, just like our parody of stereotypes at the beginning, the asocial, mumbling lecturer who doesn't notice how unsatisfied his date is and is raising a young Republican, reads as a collection of the most inane misconceptions about intellectuals.

As a result, it is hard to judge the characters in Smart People. Lawrence is so miserable, but he never strikes the viewer as particularly intelligent, either. Instead, whenever Janet states something and poses the question, "You knew that, right?" he simple nods and says "Of course." As a result, Lawrence is - at best - a poseur and one only wonders what negative experiences director Noam Murro and writer Mike Poirier had in academia that makes them think such a poseur could survive in a university setting so long.

Similarly, Vanessa - played by Ellen Page and the whole reason I picked up Smart People to watch - is more bratty than most young intellectuals and she does not so much learn anything in the course of the movie. Instead, she simply begins to emulate and hit on Uncle Chuck, then stupidly wonders why he would be avoiding her.

Murro goes for the cheapest of laughs with Chuck, featuring multiple shots of him sleeping with his bare buttocks exposed. It's amazing what passes for humor these days and if the first instance of this is juvenile, the second occurrence is just brain-numbingly insipid. Just as the supposedly smart people are treated as idiots, the audience is supposed to understand Chuck is somehow intellectually inferior because his butt ends up exposed while he sleeps. There is only so much insulting of the audience one might be expected to endure.

I've been on an Ellen Page kick of late and Smart People gives her a role different from the others I have seen her in. Unfortunately, it puts her in a role that is disturbingly lowbrow for her. Some of her roles have put her playing people who act young because they are young, but as Vanessa, she is forced to play somewhat mindlessly bratty without any real finesse that illustrates there is anything truly empathetic about her character.

Similarly, Thomas Haden Church is unfortunately utilized in a role that seems awfully familiar for those who have seen the actor in other things. And I'm not a fan of Sarah Jessica Parker's acting in general and Smart People does not give her a role that is meaty or interesting enough in any way that makes the viewer rethink their position on her.

In fact, of the main cast, the only one who does a decent job is Dennis Quaid. The last work of Quaid's I enjoyed was his role in American Dreamz (reviewed here!) and his characterization of Lawrence is a strikingly different performance. Not just the beard, but his whole body language is transformed into a sullen, slouching lecturer who is able to drone without any real affect. Quaid - who is often charismatic - plays this astonishingly well and makes Lawrence largely unlikable.

On DVD, Smart People looks and sounds fine - though there are some moments where the editing was noticeably choppy. There is a commentary track, blooper reel and deleted scenes, none of which made the movie any better. The featurettes repeat a bit of the information from the commentary track and add little in the way of real insight.

I went into Smart People ready to be stimulated and to laugh and when it was over, I just felt cheated. There are much better movies out there.

For other works with Ellen Page, please visit my reviews of:
Super
Inception
Whip It
Juno
An American Crime
X-Men III: The Last Stand
Hard Candy

5/10

For other film review, be sure to check out my Movie Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2012, 2009 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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John Carter Might Look Good On The Big Screen, But . . .

The Good: Visually engaging, Moments of action
The Bad: Acting is largely terrible, Light on character development, Plot is mundane at best.
The Basics: When John Carter is taken off to Mars, the viewer is given a visual marvel that is ultimately insubstantial.


Every year, it seems, I get my hopes up for a movie I truly know nothing about. Sure, I’m jazzed for Prometheus, The Dark Knight Rises and The Avengers later this year, but when I saw the trailers for John Carpenter, I thought I would root for this strange, wonderful-looking science fiction epic. Having attended a preview screening of the film, I am once again in that place I too-often find myself after I get my hopes up; I am disappointed. In the case of John Carter, I am not sure if “utterly disappointed” applies, but I do know I am pretty disappointed.

The source of my disappointment is simple: John Carter is campy, poorly-acted and in so many ways mundane. What looked like it would be a sprawling epic turns into a series of obvious conflicts with a protagonist who is hardly worth rooting for. Instead, I spent much of the time watching John Carter waiting for something – anything – to happen that would make me care about the title character. Unfortunately, that moment never came and I left the more than two hour movie feeling bored. It is also worth noting that I have not read any of the books upon which John Carter is based. As a result, this is a very pure review of the film John Carter.

John Carter, who fought for the Confederate Army and has ended up in Arizona looking for gold. Chased by Powell and a group of Native American Indians, John Carter is abducted and taken to Mars. On Mars, he quickly discovers that the lower gravity affords him greater strength and agility than he ever had on Earth. Joining the green Martian Tharks – they call Mars “Barsoom” – Carter fights his way to a prominent position in the tribe and he begins to find life on Mars more worthwhile than his terrestrial life.

When the Tharks capture Dejah Thoris, a red-skinned Martian from the Helium tribe, John Carter feels the abduction is unjust. Liberating her, Carter flees with her. Her rescue puts Carter at the center of planetwide conflicts that force him to use his strength, stamina and smarts to both survive and unify the fractured planet.

I’m not exactly sure who John Carter is intended for, other than those who are already fans of the pulp science fiction novels upon which the movie is based. John Carter suffers from being seriously campy and campy in an earnest way. John Carter is campy in the way that Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow mercilessly parodied, but John Carter does not seem to realize it is truly that hokey. Instead, the film progresses with a serious tone even through its more unintentionally laughable moments. It’s like Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time (reviewed here!) but set on Mars. It has one gimmick, a lot of special effects and ultimately adds up to nothing at all impressive or in the range of its potential.

Like The Sands Of Time, Disney assembled a surprisingly wonderful cast for John Carter, with Willem Dafoe, Mark Strong, Ciaran Hinds, Thomas Hayden Church and Bryan Cranston all appearing physically or as CG constructs with their vocal talents. John Carter has a suitably impressive cast . . . for the supporting parts.

What John Carter lacks entirely is a performance by the lead protagonist that sells the new reality to the audience. Taylor Kitsch is, in a word, horrible as the title character. To be fair to Kitsch, John Carter is a sword and sorcery type fantasy movie set on Mars and it seems like one of the big criteria for the character of John Carter has to be that he looks damn good without a shirt on. In that regard, Kitsch delivers. But beyond that, he is utterly unlikable in the role of John Carter. Kitsch is stiff, distant and physically withdrawn far too often to make John Carter a likable or plausible protagonist. Instead, he lacks a spark or any sense of quirky individuality that would otherwise sell the viewer on such a fantastic character. John Carter may be disaffected and morose, but Kitsch seems that way playing him.

Kitsch is paired with Lynn Collins, whose primary qualification seems to be that she looks good and is near the height of Taylor Kitsch. Her bright eyes look more vacant than expressive far too often.

While John Carter has fairly decent computer-generated effects, the 3-D effects are nothing to write home about. I was much more impressed by the effects in the reworked 3-D version of The Phantom Menace. While one might expect the digital landscapes of Mars to be wonderful in the 3-D medium, director Andrew Stanton does not make very good use of the technology. As well, John Carter suffers from editing that ranges from mediocre to terrible. There are a number of sequences that feature awkward cuts and surprisingly rough transitions.

Ultimately, John Carter is a science fiction epic that does not engage the viewer or make a bolder statement than “look at what we can put on screen.” Sadly, that is not enough.

For other Disney live-action works, please check out my reviews of:
Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
Tron: Legacy
Oceans
Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time
Alice In Wonderland
Old Dogs
G-Force
Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End
Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe
Pirates Of The Caribbean: The Curse Of The Black Pearl
The Princess Diaries
Tron

4/10

For other movie reviews, please visit my Film Review Index Page for an organized listing of all the movie reviews I have written.

© 2012 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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The Television Flop Ned And Stacey Makes A DVD Flop!

The Good: Inexpensive, Moments of delightfully cruel humor
The Bad: Mostly not funny, Unlikable characters, Mediocre (at best) acting, Predictable.
The Basics: Despite a pretty decent cast, Ned And Stacey - The Complete First Season is just another baffling DVD release of a mediocre comedy that is more cruel than funny.


Some things take fortitude, time and a sense that it's worthwhile to review a product. And then there are those of us who will suffer through miserable products just to review something. It was with that sense that I picked up and watched Ned And Stacey - The Complete First Season on DVD.

As part of FOX's seemingly endless attempt to find programs that could hold an audience like Married . . . With Children and The Simpsons, it created Ned And Stacey a typical situation comedy that does what few other series's before or since have managed to do quite a well; it shows that even with a talented cast, you can make a terrible show. Even with Greg Germann, Thomas Hayden Church, and a very young looking Debra Messing, Ned And Stacey is just plain terrible.

Ned Dorsey is trudging through his job desperate to find a way to get ahead when he realizes that most people who are married get the promotions that he feels he deserves. Stacey Dorsey is a journalist who is desperate to move out of her parents' house and when she sees Ned's apartment, she falls in love with the flat. Despite the fact that the two cannot stand one another, they see a union between them as the best possible way to achieve their goals, so they marry. Stacey gets out of her parents' house and Ned begins to get ahead at work.

What follows is their adventures as they navigate keeping up the appearance of being married while they strive to achieve their goals and find people better than their legal spouse to be with. Ned spends much of his time with his best friend and (as luck would have it, suddenly his) brother-in-law, Rico. Eric (who Ned refers to by the nickname) is married to Amanda, Stacey's sister and best friend. Things get complicated for the quartet because Amanda loathes Ned and this often leads the two to openly fight with one another.

And while the concept may seem momentarily interesting, it soon falls into the habits of the standard sitcom and the concept drives many of the plots. So, as a result, there are episodes where Ned and Stacey relay fake wedding stories, cheat on one another (they are legally married, so when one seeks sex elsewhere, technically it is cheating despite it being a loveless arrangement), and buy a bed together. Ned usurps Stacey's job prospects by being more talented than her in her field. And, of course, misunderstandings arise among friends and acquaintances, like a client thinking Ned is gay when he realizes Ned and Stacey do not share a bedroom.

Yes, it's pretty standard FOX marital material. There's an unhappy couple, lots of sarcasm (recalling of course that sarcasm is different from irony or being facetious because the intent is to hurt another), a laugh track that telegraphs everything and situations that pretty much write their own solutions. But mostly, it's just a collection of four people being mean to one another. Granted, Ned is the most consistently cruel, but the premise sets itself up to alternate between being unkind (at best) to one another or outright, shamefully mean to each other. Life is too short to watch on television what exists far too often in reality and here it is so contrived as to be laughable that the project ever received a green light.

After sitting and watching all twenty-four episodes, I'm at a loss to say what I actually watched. The comedy was so standard that the show repeats itself and uses the reverse premise to fill episodes. So, for example, it does not take long before the sham marriage begins to wear on Stacey and she meets a nice guy who she would like to be with. So, she has a minor dilemma about cheating on her husband (in-name-only). A few episodes later, Ned realizes he might be able to get ahead by cheating on Stacey and sleeping his way to the top. And a few episodes after that, Stacey meets another guy . . . The point is, the plot is so predictable and it was obvious that the series had to go there at some point. It would be utterly ridiculous to think that Ned and Stacey would loathe one another and NOT look for companionship outside their "marriage," but how quickly the series got to the point that they used the plot and how many times they reused it in just the first season is disappointing at best, baffling at worst.

Of course, decent characters can save even a lame-concept sitcom. Unfortunately for Ned And Stacey, this series does not even have that. The quartet of regulars in the first season includes:

Ned - A raging egomaniac with a mild case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, he defines self-centered. With his dry wit and underlying meanness, he makes little effort to understand Stacey and her problems and shows little compassion for his best friend, as well. He does manage to have moments of softness, but they usually end in a punchline and no genuine sense that he had grown,

Stacey - Ned's hot wife who wanted nothing more than to get out of her parents' house and ended up married to Ned, whom she does not love. She has some talent for journalism (she has a degree in it), and is as optimistic as Ned is cynical. Her sister is her best friend and she spends as much time with her to avoid Ned as possible,

Amanda - Stacey's sister, Eric's husband, she hates Ned and does what she can to sabotage the relationships between Ned and Stacey and Ned and Eric. Often, she exerts a strong pull on Eric to get him to avoid Ned. She is a real estate agent and spends much of her time angry,

and Eric - Amanda's husband, "Rico" to Ned, he is a mild-mannered guy who is walked on by Ned and Amanda. He is an accountant at the advertising firm he and Ned work at and he's pretty bland. What drives him and Ned together is never entirely clear.

The problem with the characters, in addition to being blandly written "types" is that they do not come alive and they do not challenge the actors portraying them. So, for example, Greg Germann, who was just great on Ally McBeal as Fish, plays Eric as a browbeaten guy with no real differentiation between him and the similar character he played on the first season of Ellen. In other words, we've seen it from him before.

Debra Messing is all right as Stacey, though she seems to rely more on her looks and innate cheerfulness to get her through than anything particularly compelling in her performance. Indeed, the opening bit where she and Thomas Hayden Church, in character, lay out the premise to the show illustrates the entirety of the range she utilizes on this series. She has a niche and she works that rut for all its worth.

But the real disappointment for me is Thomas Hayden Church. I like him a great deal and I've enjoyed him in many things. He was underutilized and CG-ed out for much of Spider-man 3 (reviewed here!) and I remember feeling that was a grave disappointment. The problem is that here he has one schtick; a deadpan, dead-eyed sarcasm that he plays with a consistency that borders on monotony. He has the capacity to do so much more and here his talents are wasted as an offensive jerk with no real redeeming qualities.

Ned And Stacey - The Complete First Season on DVD is as baffling to me as the motivation between releasing Dharma & Greg - Season 1 to the permanent medium. Was this just a desperate attempt to try to cash in while Thomas Hayden Church was performing in one of the biggest films of the year? Was it an attempt to synergize with Debra Messing's Will & Grace DVD releases? Who knows? What I can say is that all 24 episodes of the first season look and sound good on the three disc set. There is a commentary track on the pilot episode (by the creator of the series) and there is a decent-sized featurette that includes participation from most of the cast. Indeed, given that there is not much one can do with sitcoms in terms of DVD bonus features, this ends up being surprisingly adequate for the DVD release and sucks it up just enough to save it from complete and utter panning.

But it's not enough to even come close enough to recommending this. It's insulting to the intelligence of viewers and it is insulting to the characters in a way that suggests a sickness to enjoy watching it performed. Fortunately, the participants in it all went on to do other things that redeemed them for this grave cinematic injustice.

For other shows that originally aired on FOX, please check out my reviews of:
Family Guy Presents: It’s A Trap!
Glee - Season Two, Volume One
Fringe - Season Two
Arrested Development
Wonderfalls
Firefly
The Lone Gunmen
Millennium
VR.5
The X-Files
The Adventures Of Brisco County Jr.

3.5/10

For other television reviews, please be sure to visit my index page on the subject by clicking here!

© 2011, 2008 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.

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With Spider-man 3, Sam Raimi Gets Strike 3 - He's Out!

The Good: Thomas Hayden Church/Flint Marko, James Franco/Harry Osborn
The Bad: The Sandman, Most of the other characters, acting and plot, Special effects
The Basics: Outside a few moments where James Franco and Thomas Hayden Church are given the screen and enough script to work with, Spider-Man 3 is a dud.


Before I give my bottomline on Spider-man 3, let me tell you how much I was looking forward to it. I didn't get into the whole cinematic Spider-man phenomenon the last few years as the film franchise began. I relented the last day Spider-man (reviewed here!) was at my local theater, just to see what all the fuss was about. Then, nothing. When buzz about Spider-Man 3 began, I saw an image of Thomas Hayden Church and I said to myself, "he looks just like the Sandman!" See, the weird thing is, I don't remember ever seeing an episode of anything with Sandman in it, but I saw the striped shirt and I knew who he was supposed to me. Time passed. It leaked that Venom was going to be in the film, my interest was piqued. Topher Grace was announced as Eddie Brock, Jr. (who transforms into Venom) and my thought was "That's brilliant casting!" Brock has to have the same gravitas as Peter Parker, they are foil characters and Topher Grace struck me as an ideal foil to the bland, wholesome Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker. So, I began to get excited. I saw the first trailer and I was excited up until the moment I saw the first images of the Sandman and my heart fell. Nevertheless, I knew I was going to be one of the geeks out for the midnight showing, so I decided to let my love of actor Alfred Molina take over and I recently watched Spider-man 2 (reviewed here!). Having just now returned from the midnight showing of Spider-man 3, I'm prepared to render my bottomline verdict right here at the top: if you haven't purchased your tickets yet, don't bother.

This is, at best, matinee material. Had I known it would be as bad as it was, I would have waited until it came to my local library on DVD and watched it for free. Seriously. And I was generally looking forward to this installment! Come with me, I'll show you where it all goes wrong.

Following quite immediately on the heels of its predecessor, Peter Parker is very much in love with Mary Jane Watson and after a visit with her to her Broadway opening and a night in the park, Peter tracks some alien goo home. Because it's good, sedate goo, it waits for Peter to be attacked by Harry Osborn, who knows he is Spider-man. Incapacitating his former best friend, Peter wounds Harry and Osborn loses his memory. While Harry recovers, Peter neglects Mary Jane Watson some and finds himself in a competition at his job with a new photographer named Eddie Brock. When Spider-man is attacked while getting the key to the city - for saving the police commissioner's daughter from a random crane - by a sentient pile of sand, Peter becomes lost to his inner demons.

Returning home, Peter falls victim to a very real demon, the patient black goo, which causes him to become more aggressive by picking a fight with the Sandman, who he has learned is Flint Marko, the thief who killed his uncle. Defeating the Sandman with a train and water, the transformed Spider-man/Peter Parker begins to become more aggressive, picking fights with Eddie Brock, pushing away Mary Jane, strutting pointlessly around New York City, and ultimately engaging in a big dance number with Gwen Stacy (I wish I were joking, people). Following this incident, which culminates in even more violence, Parker rejects the black goo, Brock gets slimed by it and everything comes together in a big, ridiculous hostage situation/battle that is as silly and frenetic as it is predictable.

Let's start with what is done well, because there is so little here. First, Thomas Hayden Church does well as Flint Marko. I'm making a point to delineate here. Flint Marko, sympathetic cat burglar who is after a whole lot of cash for his ailing daughter is lightyears ahead of most villains in this type of movie. Marko has a purpose and he generally goes after that purpose. Thomas Hayden Church is remarkably well cast and he has good gravitas in the role. Indeed, when he delivers his classic line "I'm not a bad man, I've just had bad luck," it could have come out sounding canned, dull and cliche, but he sells it. While Church is Marko, the character works. That means in the beginning and the end. When Church is playing the Sandman . . . we'll get to that in a moment.

The other bright spot is James Franco as Harry Osborn. Franco is an acting heavy and here he comes into his own like I've known he eventually would. Franco held the screen with Robert De Niro in City By The Sea and here he shows the same level of acting ability in playing the tortured and tormenting Osborn. When he's angry, we believe him, when he's calculating, we buy it. When he's hurt, he makes us feel like he is diminished. He is the one to watch this film.

I wish I could say the same for Topher Grace. Grace was well cast to be a foil to Tobey Maguire. The problem is Eddie Brock is so poorly written that Grace has virtually nothing to work with. Brock is an accessory to the Parker storyline and he is added in at such judicious intervals that the viewer sits and wonders why they bothered. If they were going to plague us with a Spider-man 4, he ought to have been saved for that. As it is, Brock appears in only one scene without Parker and Venom comes into the film so ridiculously late as to belay sensibility.

The other draw is Bryce Dallas Howard as Gwen Stacy. I don't begrudge her from taking airtime from Kirsten Dunst, but the part is a pretty weak one. Despite the fact that Gwen Stacy has one of the few genuine moments of character in the entire movie - when she realizes that the possessed Peter Parker is using her in the big dance number solely to hurt Mary Jane, Stacy apologizes to her - most of the time Howard's role is to play Gwen Stacy as a damsel in distress and a toy to be tossed between Brock and Parker and then away.

To finish off the subject of the acting, both Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst continue to underwhelm as Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson. Maguire is bland and dull and when he is supposedly having his character conflicts, he plays Parker as bland, with a strut. There's no energy, there's no aggression, there's no hurt or determination. He's just dull. Similarly, Dunst failed to impress me in a single scene she was in. As Mary Jane Watson, she does not appear stung when hit, seduced when kissing, even angry when spited. Worst of all when Watson, damsel in distress that she is, is literally hanging for her life, Dunst does not play her with any realistic amount of fear.

But, of course, what does it matter? She's a woman after all. Women in Spider-Man 3 are either helpless damsels in distress (Watson and Stacy), objects to be leered at (the many women of Parker's strutting sequence) or crones who pop up with wisdom after everything has already been made clear (Aunt May). And the less said about the women in the background of crowd scenes the better. When Spider-man is announced as he comes to get the key to the city, some of the supernumeraries in the background are hamming it up something fierce with their "I see the Rapture" performances.

The only thing worse than the bulk of the acting and the utter lack of genuine character (outside Flint Marko and Harry Osborn) are the special effects. Special effects ought to be . . . wait for it . . . special. They can enhance great acting, they can make the impossible real and they can create realities that simply would be otherwise difficult or expensive to make. But most of all, the key to visual effects is something simple:

You have to be able to see it.

Any truly great special effect stands up because it can be seen. The best effects integrate with reality and meld with actual live human footage seamlessly. The result is the creation of a new reality on screen that makes the impossible real and the best effects make that clear. In The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, Gollum becomes believable because he is lit perfectly, he moves like a human and because the audience can see him and evaluate him as a part of the reality on the screen.

The first battle of the movie, wherein Harry Osborn as a New Goblin gets into a big, aerial fight with Peter Parker, the special effects are anything but special. Everything happens with such dizzying speed that nothing is comprehensible. Nothing in the scene is real because it happens on a giant screen at a speed that is so fast that nothing sinks in. To wit, Harry whips out something green and starts beating Peter with it. Is it a lightsaber? Is it a baton? It is a letter opener? It is an inanimate carbon rod? Who knows? It's not shown clearly until far, far later in the movie. In order for special effects to work, they have to be real and the speed here cheats reality in such a way that the scene becomes a big, blurry mess.

Moreover, the use of CG characters for Peter/Spider-man, Harry/Goblin and later Venom and the Sandman are almost all universally sloppy. They look animated most of the time and it's unfortunate because robbing the scenes of their reality pulls the viewer out of the experience in a very horrible way.

Which brings me to the Sandman. The Sandman is presented essentially two different ways. At times, he is in the very human form of Flint Marko. Those scenes are great because it's mostly Thomas Hayden Church in a striped shirt. Sometimes, the Sandman is just a big hunk of . . . you guessed it, sand. The formation of the Sandman wherein the sand first tries desperately to coalesce into the man works well, especially considering much of it is done without the ability to emote through the eyes. That works.

What did not work was virtually every other scene where the Sandman appeared as sand. Leaping out of a full truck of sand, appearing as an apparent mountain of sand and even the final disappearance of the Sandman featuring a wind that only blows sand (not anyone nearby's hair . . .). The whole Sandman portion of the film suffers from the "Hellboy Villain Problem." In the cinematic version of Hellboy the movie suffers because the villain simply continues to get bigger and bigger (physically). Flint Marko works, initial Sandman works, Big Fist Sandman is an embarrassment and by the time we get to Skyscraper-sized Sandman (seen in many of the trailers!), the effect is so far out of reality that the movie is long dead. The effects buried it.

Of course, the poor effects might have been the final nail in the coffin of a movie that lopped off a leg with a lack of character, took the other leg off with bland acting, and tied both hands behind the back of the film with a crummy script. Spider-Man 3 was bound and gagged by extended self-referential bits. I like the Marvel movie's "Where's Stan Lee?" bits. They can make even the worst Marvel outings have two seconds of pleasure. In Spider-man 3, that moment is longer. So, too, is the "cameo" by Bruce Campbell. Don't get me wrong; I like Bruce Campbell, but his extended appearance in this movie as the maitre d' is just an homage to Campbell and it pulls the viewer out of the narrative. I will not even write about the supposed comic relief involving J. Jonah Jameson. This sort of self-congratulatory, acknowledging the film series as a film series just stuffs a big, sweaty sock in the mouth of our already wounded movie.

But what shot this poor, dumb movie in the skull between the eyes? The big dance number. You've no idea how much I wish I were making up the idea that after strutting around a la Saturday Night Fever, Peter Parker shames Mary Jane Watson by dancing manically. And as I watched this scene, I became more and more sick to my stomach. I realized why with surprising speed; the scene was familiar to me. I had seen this type of ridiculous, exaggerated dancing before. Where? The Mask. You know, the Jim Carrey movie? Peter Parker with black goo becomes Jim Carrey in a zoot suit.

The film does not come back from that. It doesn't matter how arguably cool looking Venom is when he finally emerges. It doesn't matter how debilitatingly predictable the movie becomes in relation to Peter Parker and Harry Osborn, the movie is dead the moment Tobey Maguire is seen at the piano. It's dead. Period.

My final post mortum is this: the writers of this movie insulted me time and time again and one of the most blatant insults was the idea that no one working on this film seems to know what short term memory is. When Peter and Harry engage in their time-lapse opening battle, Harry - the viewer is told - loses his short term memory. This includes him not knowing Peter Parker is Spider-man and how his father died, an event that occurred two years prior. Two years ago puts the damage in long term memory. Short term memory is like a flash drive, maybe fifteen minutes worth of information before it is archived into long term memory. Damage to short term memory is debilitating for forming new memories, as portrayed in the fabulous film Memento. My point here is that this is information that is widely known, a mistake like this up front is just insulting. It was bad enough my senses were assaulted, I didn't need my intelligence insulted as well.

If you feel like you must see Spider-man 3, heed my advice (well, my strongest recommendation would be "don't, until you can do it for free!") and wait for a matinee or for it to come to the dollar theater on its way out of town. Between trying to cram too much in, underdeveloping what is there, suffering through performances by the same bland actors and special effects that are more cartoon-like than reality, Spider-Man 3 is a bust.

For other movies based upon the Marvel comic books, please check out my reviews of:
Captain America: The First Avenger
X-Men: First Class
Thor
Iron Man 2
The Incredible Hulk
Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer
Blade: Trinity
Elektra
Daredevil


3.5/10

For other film reviews, please visit my index page by clicking here!

© 2011, 2007 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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