Sometimes the critics get movies very wrong.  They often times feed off each other and the buzz of the first, becomes the momentum of the many.  Spiderman 3 received some bad reviews and in retrospect, it was the reviews themselves that were bad not the movie, nor the direction nor the plot nor the acting.

The acting was actually excellent.  There wasn’t a bad actor / actress in the bunch, and their performances were terrific.  Each added depth to their characters on multiple levels.  Its actually pretty rare for the 3rd movie in a series like this to present new levels to the characters, but the cast pulled it off.

Tobey Maguire played up the schizo and angry Spiderman very well.  The Saturday Night Fever sidewalk foot jive was a bit much, but the gloomy brooding part was excellent. Kirsten Dunst similarly did a great job as well both with the display of confusion and mixed emotions when she was forced to break up or lie to Peter (not sure what was really happening for that part). James Franco was all over the place in this movie and that was exactly what the role seemed to require.  It was actually very cool watching him tie things up neetly at the end. Thomas Church delivered what was probably the best performance of the movie.  That serious sad look that he was perplexed with throughout the movie was very intense and showed a new depth to the man that usually plays it straight in comedy routines. I didn’t even recognize Topher Grace and was very impressed with his performance from the Church seen forward. Rosemary Harris delivered and probably doesn’t get enough credit for her on screen presence.  Her sage advice and screen presence remind me of Morgan Freeman. Even JK Simmons delivered the good.  Who would have thought that J J Jameson would have a little depth in his hard ass editor routine.

Tobey Maguire … Spider-Man / Peter Parker Kirsten Dunst … Mary Jane Watson James Franco … New Goblin / Harry Osborn Thomas Haden Church … Sandman / Flint Marko Topher Grace … Venom / Eddie Brock Rosemary Harris … May Parker J.K. Simmons … J. Jonah Jameson

My only criticism (besides the jive street dancing) was the chase / fight scene between Spiderman and the Goblin when they were flying between the narrow buildings before the Goblin fell down and bumped his little head.

The sequence flew by far too fast to follow what was going on there and that took away from the suspense a bit.  Fortunately, it wasn’t too long and the movie came around to getting back into the depth of the characters.

I don’t know that I’d but this up there with Batman Returns, but as comic book movies go, this along with Superman Returns definitely shows some promise for the concept of long lived good sequels.

Well, it happened again.  I watched another Death Wish movie with Charles Bronson.  Its getting such that I can’t turn AMC on without seeing Bronson in Death Wish Umpteen.  Surprisingly Death Wish IV was actually better than Death Wish 2 and 3 together.  They were so bad that 2 + 3 didn’t come close to equaling 4.

Death Wish IV has a couple peculiar concepts to it.  Charles Bronson still has not given up on the ladies and seems to have found a girl friend about 20 years younger than he is that has a twenty year old daughter.  She dies of a drug overdose and that sets things up.

The movie is set at the beginning of the drug wars (pre crack but heavy with cocaine and hints of heroin).  In this one a rich doo-gooder forces, blackmails Charles Bronson into doing what Bronson wants to do anyway, go hunt down drug dealers as The Vigilante.

The rich guy funds Bronson with the weapons and spy tools he needs.  Apparently, Bronson has learned how to tap phones between Death Wish III and IV.

Long story short the plot actually has a lot of twists.  After watching the last 3 movies you wouldn’t expect any of these twists to take place, but if you watch this movie before watching I, II, or III, they probably appear predictable.

See if you recognize the mafia guy sitting on the left side of the table.

All in all this is a pretty decent movie for an 80’s B movie.  Its possibly even better than the first movie.  Its hard to tell if Bronson acted better in this one or the first one.  I doubt you can find this at a video rental place so it won’t do any good to offer a Bluefly coupon, but if it repeats on AMC again, it might just be worth watching.

OK, this will definitely be the last in this series.  That’s what I told myself almost as soon as I started watching this movie. 

Charles Bronson comes back for a third movie and like a series that you keep hoping will get better even though you realize its unlikely, this one just got worse.  To call it a cliche movie is almost insulting to cliches.

It was ridiculous from the .475 caliber automatic handgun that Charles Bronson ordered through the mail.

It had a clip that held enough bullets to kill all bad guys within a cluster of bad guys before requiring a reload.  It also shot bullets designed to kill a lion or an elephant.  I’m sure you have seen African safari’s where they use chrome plated automatic hand guns to shoot at elephants.  It also amazingly had no kick to it apparently.

Then there was the ridiculous scene where Bronson is firing an M60 and holding the weapon by the heat shield, because heat shields on a machine gun like that do not get hot enough to melt your skin to the weapon. 

Of course, amazingly, this movie had some interesting stars in it including Ingrid Bergman- or someone that looked like him.  Ingrid Bergman loves to be in a post apocalyptic movie (think escape from New York).  Surprisingly, Alex Winter, Bill, from  Bill and Ted’s excellent adventures with Keanu Reeves was also in this movie.

There was also a guy in it that looked a lot like The Krugman – main bad guy, in Highlander, but it wasn’t the same guy. 

That guy (in Highlander) went on to do lots of voice work in about every cartoon your kids every liked including Sponge Bob Square pants.  Yeah I was surprised too.

All in all the movie was a wash, but unlike the very first movie it didn’t have the cops using some crazy type of computing power that was not possible for the time period.  I kept expecting them to throw in some zany talk in this late 80’s movie about business performance management software running on datacubes with a Performance Point installation and graphics powered by Excelsius or something. 

Sometimes a TiVo and Reruns are a bad mix.  I recently watched a seventies movie by Charles Bronson called Death Wish, which was pretty good.  Death Wish II came on right after it that night and I TiVo’s it and watched it a couple days later. 

Death Wish II was OK, but didn’t have the energy nor the potential for actually happening like the first movie.

When I say, "actually happening" I mean the plot set up as opposed to the unlikely coincidence of a man growing up as a weapons expert and sharp shooter but serving in the Korean War as a conscientious objector only to later turn vigilante . . .   well OK, so there wasn’t much believable about the plot either in the first one.

Somehow the second movie took the first unlikely scenario and made it even more unlikely in an early eighties setting in California.

Well, just to find some closure the other night Death Wish III came on and I TiVo’d it too.  Charles Bronson plays an architect that does amazing do for real estate developers by day and kills criminals and thugs with abandon by night, easily slipping the police dragnets.  The thing is, he has no family to kill off going into Death Wish III as they all died off in Death Wish II.  Maybe this time, Charles Bronson’s death wish is a wish for more family deaths to keep the plot moving along.