HOW do you kill off Spider-Man? I’ve puzzled over that question through all three installments of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man saga, and the answer still eludes me. The spider-bite that transformed Peter Parker, über-nerd, into a wall-crawling, webslinging superfreak obviously augmented his strength to near-Superman proportions, enabling him to lift buildings off his lady love and yank speeding trains to a screeching halt. But more impressive than his strength is his physical resilience: He survives plunges from heights that would kill a lesser superhero, gets sideswiped by speeding trains without skipping a beat, and lasts a lot longer than you or I would while getting smashed, repeatedly, by the fist of a seven-story-tall sand monster.
This last sequence takes place near the end of Spider-Man 3, and it isn’t a good sign for the franchise that I was more invested in figuring out what it takes to kill off Spidey-four punches from the Sandman’s elephant-sized fists? five? six?-than in anything else that had happened on screen in the previous two hours. There are rumors that this was the most expensive movie ever made, eclipsing even the inflation-adjusted price of the Taylor-Burton Cleopatra, and the money wasn’t exactly spent in vain: Spider-Man 3 is stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey, with more villains, more love interests, more special effects, and (alas) more dance numbers than the previous two movies put together. Indeed, given the price tag, I suppose it’s almost understandable that a Sony Pictures accountant looked hard at the balance sheet and decided that if they were going to finance all that CGI, they couldn’t afford to shell out for a screenplay too.
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