Spidey's enemy within

May 3 2007 Mike Davies reviews the latest cinema releases

• SPIDER-MAN 3 * * *
  Cert 12A, 140 mins

The third in Sam Raimi's web-spinning super-hero trilogy and the first of the year's summer blockbusters, there's no doubt that this will make a phenomenal record-breaking opening box office impact. However, word of mouth may see a significant drop off in the following weeks since, while undeniably very good in parts with some thrilling action sequences, it's ultimately an underwhelming disappointment.

Longer than Spider-Man 2, it feels bloated yet still struggles to resolve all the storylines, resulting in a cluttered, bitty and repetitive narrative that piles one climax on top of another while leaving some character developments seriously underwritten.

Essentially a moral fable about the self-destructiveness and emptiness of revenge and the healing power of forgiveness, it finds Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) confronting his and Spider-Man's dark side when he discovers that the two bit criminal he believed shot his uncle Ben (and who fell to his death escaping Spider-Man in the first film) was not the actual killer.

Rather (in a departure from the comic saga), it was Flint Marko (Thomas Haden Church), an escaped con who's just been accidentally transformed into a living sand super-villain. Naturally, this being Marvel Comics, there's more to Marko than just some simple black and white bad guy, narrative elements that will eventually play a part in the message of understanding and compassion the film seeks to deliver.

Before then, however, there's plenty of action. Not content with one nemesis, the screenplay offers three more. Seeking revenge for his father's death, for which he blames his one-time best friend, Harry Osborn (James Franco) has reinvented himself as a new Green Goblin, prompting the first and best of the film's set pieces with a pulse pounding fight between him and a civvy clad Parker.

Then there's the alien symbiot that bonds itself to Peter, forming a new rubbery black costume and, feeding on his burning anger and frustrations, unlocking his darker side. And finally, once that little struggle's been fought, the sticky black stuff takes over a new host with a burning grudge, transforming him into Venom.

In the comics, he's arguably Spider-Man's most formidable foe but while they've got the look right, by not making an appearance until the final act, the character never really gets the space to make the memorable impression it should.

Meanwhile, there's a clutch of sub-plots to juggle involving romantic interest Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) and her failed Broadway career, jealousy problems over Spider-Man's new fame and the arrival of new girl on the scene Gwen Stacy (Bryce Dallas Howard), and Parker's rival photographer Eddie Brock (Topher Grace).

Unfortunately, a lot of this gets short shrift, serving largely to allow Maguire to have fun playing Mr Nasty as he adopts a new hairstyle, swaggers around the streets and humiliates both MJ and Brock. It's not unentertaining, but there's times when it can't help but feel padded and the comic relief (especially Bruce Campbell channelling John Cleese as a 'French' maitre d') overextended at the expense of what ought to be a darker tone and weakening the film's emotional heart.

Although there's solid support from Rosemary Harris and JK Simmons as Aunt May and J Jonah Jameson, with the exception of Franco none of the central performances hit the emotional or dramatic high notes of the previous film, Dunst especially ill at ease as an awkwardly unsympathetic MJ, while the script singularly fails to find the depth to match its psychological ambitions.

• THE UPSIDE OF ANGER * * * *
  Cert 15, 117 mins

For a while, it looked as though this might never actually open here. Made two years ago and having had its release date put back time and time again, writer-director Mike Binder's bittersweet comedy-drama finally arrives in wake of his Adam Sandler follow-up, Reign Over Me. That undeservedly sank without trace and I fear this will share the same fate. Which would be a great pity because, exploring a similar theme of loss, grief and salvation, it is very good indeed; an intelligent, mature relationships drama for the discerning female audience with an award worthy performance from Joan Allen and Kevin Costner on his best form in years.

Allen plays Terry Wolfmeyer, a suburban wife and mother of four independent-minded daughters who falls to pieces and takes to the bottle when one day her husband apparently walks out to start a new life in Sweden with his secretary.

The girls - matter of fact college student Hadley (Alicia Witt), ambitious Andy (Erika Christiansen), wannabe ballerina Emily (Keri Russell) and hormonally confused young teen Popeye (Evan Rachel Wood) - all respond in their own ways, but share a common belief that mom's to blame. Her relationship with them already prickly, things don't improve when she starts hitting the vodka and tonic to drown her anger, further loosening an already bitchy tongue.

Costner's her neighbour, Denny Davies, a former baseball star turned local radio presenter who refuses to talk sport and, between refilling his glass, spends his spare time, autographing the baseballs he sells online and at fan conventions. Learning of Terry's situation, he's soon turning up to offer drinking buddy consolation. Both lonely, disillusioned and wounded souls, it's no great surprise when the relationship gradually develops into something more.

Liking Denny more than their self-loathing mother, there's no huge angst issues between him and the girls. He even gets Andy, who wants to get into radio, a non-existent job working for his fortysomething womanising producer, Shep (Binder). However, things do become a touch strained between Denny and Terry when Shep and Andy start having an affair. Meanwhile, Popeye's got her own problems with the boy she has a crush on reckoning he might be gay.

Opening with a funeral to Wood's voice over narration, unfolding in flashback over the space of three years, and delivering a darkly ironic twist that throws all the emotional balls into the air, it deftly balances sharply witted, brittly funny moments with ones of genuine pain and piercing poignancy. It deserves to be seen.

• BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA * * * *
  Cert PG, 95 mins

Having already waxed lyrical over The Last Mimzy, here's another outstanding – even better – kids movie that doesn't condescend to its young audience.

A sort of meeting between Pan's Labyrinth and Macauley Culkin's My Girl, it's adapted from Katherine Paterson's bestseller with a screenplay co-written by her son David (for whom she wrote the book).

Making his live action feature after working in animation, it's also directed by Gabor Csupo who, as co-creator of The Rugrats, knows a few things about investing children's entertainment with serious, thoughtful themes.

A rural farm boy, ten-year-old Jess Aarons (Josh Hutcherson) gets picked on at school because of his artistic gifts and quiet demeanour while at home, sandwiched between four sisters, he feels starved of affection from his preoccupied father (Robert Patrick) who seems to only have time for young May Belle (Bailey Madison).

Then along comes tomboyish new neighbour Leslie Burke (AnnaSophia Robb), whose eccentric fashions and own lack of cool (her writer parents don't own a TV) make her the target of playground bully Janice (Lauren Clinton).

Fellow misfits with a shared keen imagination, the pair become fast friends, regularly escaping after school into the nearby woods, swinging across the stream on an old rope. Here, they discover and rebuild an abandoned tree house, Leslie encouraging Jess to share her fantasies of a land called Terabithia, an imaginary world where, the bullies reconceived as ogres and vulture warriors, they can address the real problems of their everyday lives.

Then something happens that tears everything apart.

Underplaying the CGI fantasy elements so that they become commentary on rather than overwhelm the story, the film grapples with the big issues of faith, God, guilt, friendship, grief, abuse and death in mature, intelligent, sensitive and compassionate fashion without ever feeling preachy.

Zooey Deschanel provides considered support as the music teacher for whom Jess nurses a crush while Madison manages to be suitably wide-eyed without being insufferably cute.

However, it's Hutcherson and Robb, respectively past stars of Zathura and Charlie & The Chocolate Factory, whose performances and chemistry light up the screen and invest the film with its heart-crushing emotional depth. A future classic.

• GOYA'S GHOSTS * *
  Cert 15 114 mins

It’s been 32 years since Milos Forman made his name and enjoyed his biggest box office success with One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. In the time since, his fortunes have been more mixed, ranging from 1984’s Oscar winning triumph Amadeus to his last outing and the misfiring Valmont to 1999’s critically well received but underperforming Man On The Moon.

He returns now for his third historical outing, a good looking but ploddingly stodgy, multi-accented Europudding melodrama, set to a backdrop that journeys from the Spanish Inquisition, through Napoleon’s invasion of Spain to the restoration of the Spanish monarchy.

However, whatever the title may suggest this isn’t actually about the artist’s (Stellan Skarsgard) life. Rather he’s a detached observer of and somewhat ineffectual participant in events, coincidentally linked to the main storyline by the fact he’s painted the portraits of both Ines (Natalie Portman), the daughter of a wealthy merchant, and Brother Lorenzo (Javier Barden), a priest who reckons the Inquisition’s gone a bit soft.

Ines is randomly arrested, tortured into confessing to Judaism and thrown into prison. Enlisting Goya’s unsuspecting aid in getting Lorenzo to dinner, her family then torture him into signing his own confession to being the son of a monkey, just to prove people will say anything to avoid pain. However, the plan to get Ines released flops, leaving the disgraced Lorenzo on the run.

Fast forward 15 years, he’s now a big wheel for Napoleon, back in a conquered Madrid to prosecute his former colleagues, Goya’s gone deaf, and Ines has pretty much lost her marbles. Finally freed, she seeks Goya’s help to find the child she bore after being raped in jail by Lorenzo. Dad, now married with a family, is naturally keen to keep paternity cases out of the public eye, while the girl (Portman again), has grown up to become a prostitute. And so it goes.

Despite being conspicuously low budget (the war’s reduced to a brief skirmish in the streets), it’s visually striking, superbly capturing the look and flavour of old Spain. However, padded out with a brief running gag about Goya’s portrait of the ugly Queen Maria, wife of King Carlos IV (Randy Quaid, hamming with relish), it never quite seems sure what points it trying to make about the abuse of power, religious fanaticism, political madness, hypocrisy or whatever.

Equally, the performances never rise above the adequate (Portman looks particularly awkward with her designer ugly make-up and mad-eyed tremblings), making it hard to find much by way of emotional engagement with any of their fates. Still, art buffs will have fun spotting the myriad references to Goya’s paintings.