Oh, the brutality
Spiderman spoilers to follow.
There should be a book cataloguing all the phrases any self-respecting screenwriter should avoid except when being sardonic. Some lines are simply too cheesy to be used otherwise, and the punishment for violating this rule should be multiple consecutive Catwoman (or possibly Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever) viewings. Without bathroom breaks, or popcorn, even.
Before it came out, I was looking forward to the third Spiderman movie. The second one had been so good, and the third one had some delicious personal complications: the black suit, Harry’s revenge, Goblin junior. And then the reviews came out. They were… less than stellar, but I saw the movie anyway, partly because I wanted to judge for myself.
Oh, the brutality.
When a roving television reporter used those words to describe the Sandman pounding Spidey with a giant fist of sand (always conveniently available throughout the streets of New York), I stopped pretending that I wasn’t laughing behind my hand. There was no point in fighting a lost cause. Luckily Harry, formerly Goblin Jr., flew into his friend’s rescue, courtesy of a conveniently timed confession from his butler. Why the butler couldn’t have unburdened himself of that tidbit of knowledge earlir, we’ll never know.
Let us not forget the Sandman’s adorable moppet, wasting away from her loosely-defined illness. Or Harry’s noble sacrifice. Or Mary Jane’s star encore as the trap for Spiderman. (Seriously, HOW has nobody in that city figured it out yet? The bad guys were ALL OVER Superman just for looking at Lois Lane.) Or emo Spidey.It was almost as bad as that time Shahrukh Khan pulled an IV out of his body, checked himself out of a hospital, ran across Manhattan in the middle of the summer (cabs and subways are for losers, apparently) less than twenty-four hours after collapsing from exertion due to his rare and fatal heart condition, and the people he went to see did not even bother to ask him what he was doing out of the hospital or how he could possibly not be dead.
But things have reached a new low if we’re looking to BOLLYWOOD for realism. Oh the brutality, indeed.
(In all fairness, I will say Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, and James Franco did the best they could with the mediocre material they were given.)