Entertainment, Movies - Air Force Times

A worn-out web

When “Spider-Man” hit the big screen in 2002, it delivered a sense of exhilarating wonder to comic-book fans everywhere. Watching Peter Parker/Spider-Man (Tobey Maguire) soar through New York’s concrete canyons on those flimsy tendrils of web fluid was a too-cool rush.

In 2004, “Spider-Man 2” upped the anter, improving on the original in almost every respect.

But with “Spider-Man 3,” we reach the familiar and highly problematic point for all such franchises, when the franchisers strive with increasingly clammy desperation to make us forget that we’ve seen it all twice before.

The third installment offers just enough mindless fun to keep it from being written off. But like Thomas Haden Church’s Sandman, who struggles mightily to hold his corporeal form in the early scenes, writer-director Sam Raimi has trouble maintaining a sense of narrative shape.

It more often feels like a disjointed collection of references from the comic-book canon, shoehorned into the film for no real purpose other than to give hard-core comics fans a brief insider buzz.

For example, the film introduces Gwen Stacy (Bryce Dallas Howard), who was Peter’s first love in the comic book, and her father, NYPD Capt. Arthur Stacy (James Cromwell), but does next to nothing with either.

Similarly, legendary Marvel Comics godfather Stan Lee pops up for a pointless five-second cameo in which he utters one of his best-known catch phrases.

The plot element that feels wedged in most awkwardly is the gooey black alien symbiote that comes to be known as Venom. It arrives out of the sky on a meteorite that plops down in a park near where Peter and his girl Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst) are stargazing.

As later explained by Peter’s college professor, Dr. Curt Connors (Dylan Baker), the symbiote bonds at the molecular level and “amplifies the characteristics of its host.”

Now, Peter Parker’s defining characteristic has always been that he’s a complete and utter dork. As such, you might logically expect the symbiote to make him even dorkier, if that’s possible.

But in one of the script’s many lapses of coherence, the symbiote instead turns him “bad” — a decidedly relative term in a PG-13 movie that mainly involves Maguire brushing a lock of hair down over his forehead and then trying to impress the ladies by doing a hilarious Disco Stu pimp stroll down Fifth Avenue.

Whatever. Peter eventually sheds the symbiote, which then latches onto Eddie Brock (Topher Grace of “That ’70s Show”).

Brock is a snide weasel who has been trying to elbow Peter aside as the favorite freelance photographer of blowhard Daily Bugle publisher J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons, squeezing solid laughs out of his too-scant screen time).

But since Grace is one of the few young mainstream actors even more soft and shapeless than Maguire himself, his transformation into Venom strikes another off-key note.

And I haven’t even mentioned Harry Osborn (mopey James Franco). Yes, he’s back and still doing a bush-league Hamlet, unable to decide whether to embrace or renounce the legacy of his late whack-job dad, the Green Goblin. Been there, done that.

All this noise is spun around a small nugget of actual story, which focuses on the evolving relationship of Peter and Mary Jane. But since this mainly involves her shrewish insecurity over her swiftly evaporating performing career (“Try to think about how I feel,” she whines), there’s not much solace to be found here, either.

Neither Maguire nor Dunst is a substantive enough actor to turn such scenes into anything more than filler. And at a running time of two hours and 20 minutes, a little less filler would have been more than welcome.

The only actor who acts with any effectiveness is Church, who wrings sympathetic pathos from his character’s background as an escaped convict desperate to help his sick little girl. And his transformation into the Sandman is the best of what is, without question, a superb crop of top-shelf CGI sequences.

If you’re willing to empty out your brainpan for a couple of hours, “Spider-Man 3” will prove sufficiently diverting. But if you demand that your summer-season blockbusters be great, not just good, you may leave disappointed.

The third time around, the webbing is not sticking nearly as well as it used to.

3 stars. Rated PG-13 for comic book-style violence. Opens May 4.