Spider-Man 3: B-

It leaps. It bounds. It spins and twists with unhuman abilities! Spider-Man 3 shoots off, from the very get-go, with full force admiration for its central character, Peter Parker, and yet in those beginning "jeewhiz-ma-I'm-so-happy" moments, it is priming us for the collapse, the famed "inner struggle" that has been shouted from every cineplex for the last few months. Before it gets there - guided by the rollicking, fumbling energy of franchise director Sam Raimi - a lot of mishaps occur. Lest I give away the plot twists (of which there are seemingly dozens), let me just hint that characters are not always who them seem, and actors you once thought capable turn ingratiating in seconds.

But my hinting hardly can describe the spectacle that is Spider-Man. It is a big, goofy, opera of a movie - a galloping action ballet with grand gestures and silent tears. The comic book aura that is Spider-Man's origins make a fitting metaphor for this film: it is a large, ripely dramatic picture inked into the national conscience with panoramic special effects and photogenic screen stars with curling baby dimples. The citizenry turn villianous with almost reckless abandon and yet their transformations get lost in the brouhaha that is the opening hour. Romance is worn on the sleeves of Raimi's screenplay (knocked together with his brother Ivan) and Tobey Maguire stands in almost every scene trapped between an infant's giggle and a man's piercing gaze. The plot seems a fractured straight line, sacrificing the ambitious, cohesive bravado of Spider-Man 2 for a scattershot crowd-pleaser.

And yet my quibbles with the film may mask the enjoyment that is to be gleaned, and there is a lot of enjoyment here. To name just a few things, J.K. Simmons still ball-busts with appropriate comedic rage and newcomer Topher Grace seeths with sleazy malevolence. Kirsten Dunst, freed artistically by Sophia Coppola in last summer's Marie Antoinette, forces her character Mary Jane to atleast grow a semblence of a personality and the special effects still fly by with whiz-bang gusto. The climax of the film is such a boisterous explosion that the many inconsistencies are almost forgotten...almost.

Maybe it is because Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer-prize winning craftsman of 2's script, is missing here - necesitating of course that the majesty is gone as well. Maybe as well it is that Maguire's struggling as an actor is becoming more and more evident, his suit tighter and tighter. Or maybe it is really because Sam Raimi turns a once purported "central theme" (e.g. Parker's struggle against that black goo symbiote) of this film into a one-note joke, and a ridiculous one at that. In the end though, the real answer I think lies in the whole of the experience itself: Spider-Man stumbled when it should have soared.