Spider-Man 3 enters the marketplace as perhaps the most widely anticipated franchise film of all time… at least until Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End opens three weeks later. A movie of significant, almost unparalleled to-scale ambition, Spider-Man 3 is, most essentially, a flamboyant test of the audience’s affection for and remembrance of its characters. Raimi, working from a script crafted with brother Ivan Raimi and returning writer Alvin Sargent, has fashioned a film that is at once ultra-aware of the commercial marketplace — jam-packed as it is with cutting-edge special effects — and yet also in many ways completely disregarding of its more rote obligations.

The best analogy I can make is that Spider-Man 3 is essentially a soap opera blowout extravaganza. It collapses a small screen serial season’s worth of juicy storylines for almost every character (Mary Jane sings on Broadway! Mary Jane gets replaced! Mary Jane gets a job as a jazz club waitress! Mary Jane gets blackmailed by Harry!) into an hour and 45 minutes, and then embellishes that with another 30 to 35 minutes or so of discrete, web-slinging, characteristically acrobatic action. The degree to which this mad compression, and all its associated tonal swings, works hinges not on the “wow” factor that helped make the first film (and, in residual fashion, the second installment) a big hit, but rather on one’s connection to the characters and their intertwined fates, friendships and rivalries. It’s a bold bet on story in a film that, you know, just happens to have cost a couple hundred million dollars to make.

Spider-Man 3 rates high enough on ambition and effort that casual fans surely won’t feel too cheated by its entertainment value. Still, it doesn’t really cohere in a deeply fulfilling way. The paradox is that such slices of mega-budget, mass entertainment are presumably so successful precisely because they appeal not to substantive and long-lasting emotional investment, but rather an audience’s desire to be thrilled, and then move on. Sam Raimi clearly believes otherwise. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.