Spider-Man 3 Review

My review of Spider-Man 3 is up at NRO:

In Spider-Man 3, director and co-writer Sam Raimi seems to have taken the line from the franchise's old theme song — does whatever a spider can — to heart. He's got Spidey doing practically everything, mixed up in a massively tangled web of plots, subplots, and back-story revisionism that threatens to crash under its own weight. But like the Webslinger himself, Raimi's direction is nimble enough to dart through the mess he's created and end up, if not entirely unscathed, pretty well-off. Spider-Man 3 swings both high and low, and though it isn't always as graceful as its predecessors, it always stays up in the air.

To enter into the world of Spider-Man is to enter into a four-color fantasy realm culled from the pages of comic books. In it, every building in New York is a skyscraper, newspapermen are all gruff and pitiless cigar-chompers, criminals running from the police encounter chain-link fences with signs that read, "DANGER: Particle Physics Laboratory," and shy nerds can slip into brightly colored underwear and save the world. Females are strange and mysterious, parental figures have all the wisdom, and day-to-day existence is marked primarily by high-flying adventure and everyday troubles. It's adult life as simplified and romanticized by 14-year-old boys everywhere. Which means that, done right, it can be a lot of fun.