Movie Review: Spider-Man 3

Spider-Man 3 [2007]

I guess it's like a once-a-year tradition for me to do one of these every year, huh? I did Spider-Man exactly two years ago and Spider-Man 2 last year, so I guess I'm wrapping my very, very slow coverage of old superhero movies with the final part of Sam Raimi's trilogy, and the movie that infamously sort of sunk the Spider-Man movie franchise for a while. And back then, there was this whole sense of how Summer superhero blockbuster movies can't fail, that they are huge opportunities for merchandising and whatnot, and Spider-Man 3 sort of came out in around the period of time where superhero movies started to transition from janky sequels to either the MCU formula (tm) or dark'n'gritty stuff.

That said, though, Spider-Man 3 is... a weird beast. The first movie was pretty solid, with a very charismatic cast and an adequate adaptation of the basic parts of Spider-Man's comic-book backstory. Spider-Man 2 was even better, easily one of the more solid superhero adaptation of its time. Spider-Man 3... let's just say that it's already way too crammed with plot threads that don't really connect anywhere, and that's before you lousily shoehorn a rehash of Spider-Man 2's romantic plot after a pretty silly bit of out-of-character moment for Peter Parker.

Let's count the plotlines, shall we? We've got the Symbiote, which isn't explained at all beyond 'weird alien from a meteorite' who sort of latches onto Peter Parker and makes him act more aggressive and even evil like a douchebag; we've got the Sandman plot that's clumsily woven into the Ben Parker story from the first movie; we've got Peter and Mary Jane handling a breakup while Peter's acting like a total doofus thanks to the Symbiote; we've got Harry Osborn's dumb, out-of-place attempt to get revenge before a butler speech makes him ralize that his dad is evil all along. Am I missing anything? I mean, I guess there's the Peter Parker/Eddie Brock rivalry and Gwen Stacy as characters that sort of get shoehorned in, too. Oh, an a random amnesia plot for Harry Osborn! I nearly forgot about that, that was dumb. 

Like, there's a universe where you could put Venom, Sandman and Green Goblin II into the same movie and make it work, I'm sure. But this isn't that movie. And it isn't something like X-Men: The Last Stand where you can sort of see a decent movie crammed into the huge pile of messiness, but Spider-Man 3's characters just do a lot of things that don't make sense just to up the angst. The strength of the previous two Raimi movies is that the characters are solid. They're not the most well-developed characters, but you can get why Harry or Peter or Mary Jane did the things they did in those movies. Here, Peter randomly gets horny and kisses Gwen Stacy in public in front of his wife. Also, even though Harry is threatening Mary Jane, she doesn't try to warn her superhero ex that something's going wrong? Also for all of the drama in how everything in Peter's life being on the up-and-up while Mary Jane loses her starring role in the play, it feels awkward and shoehorned in and we never really get any sort of a satisfying emotional conclusion to this set-up. Or the random bit where Harry's huge moment of clarity came from a random speech from his butler that causes him to realize that "oh, my dad's the Green Goblin after all".

Let's talk about the Peter/MJ bit, too -- I've never been about the huge emotional romantic moments in superhero movies, but the fact that the titular couple has to deal with the ups and downs of their lives -- where Peter's career as photographer and as Spider-Man is being all rosy-sweet while Mary Jane's losing opportunities and barely holding herself together... it could've been an interesting one as Mary Jane learns to be more mature and less jealous and Peter learns to be more of a supportive partner than a behaviour more fitting for a cheerleader. But nope, all the setup is replaced with the admittedly entertaining dancing scene at the club and a generic "rescue the screeching leading lady from the monster" third act. 

The movie is meant to be two movies, with one starring the Sandman while seeding Eddie Brock as Peter's rival, while the theoretical fourth one would've been the Venom one, but... but instead we have this hodgepodge of plot threads that really felt like they could've been expanded upon but are instead just duds. Like, Sandman gets a pretty great-for-its-time showing as a CGI villain, and the scene where he reaches out for the locket of his sick daughter is amazing as hell, but the rest of his character just feels like it's begging to be expaned upon. Flint Marko is revealed to be the guy that gunned down Ben Parker in this continuity, and it could've led to an interesting journey for Peter Parker to realize that criminals are people too or something -- particularly with Flint's obvious "I have a sick daughter and I'm making irrational, immortal decisions out of desperation" backstory. But nope, Peter just sort of fights Sandman a couple of times throughout the movie, He turns into a generic CGI sand giant, and then for some reason Spider-Man and Sandman nod at each other and Sandman flies off as a cloud of dust? What?

Eddie Brock, meanwhile... I'm not sure if there's much Topher Grace could do with the script he's given. He's set up as this opportunistic asshole with no journalistic integrity, and he's smarmy and dickish enough, for sure. But he's just kind of there, being a dick before Peter exposes him, and he gose to a church to pray and coincidentally gets glooped on by the Venom symbiote? And then he ends up being a pretty generic villain, getting Sandman to show up for a team up and spending much of the fight not having the iconic Venom mug (which the movie actually does pretty passably) but with Topher Grace's face stuck onto the CG Venom body. There are a couple of deleted scenes in the DVD that actually show Peter Parker facing with hallucinations of the Venom symbiote taking over and revealing that it's its own entity instead of just something that enhances its host's negative emotions, but cutting out those scenes really means that for anyone who didn't come into this movie with prior knowledge of what the Venom Symbiote is supposed to be, it's a heavily confusing affair all around especially with how jarringly different Venom is compared to the relatively more grounded Green Goblin and Dr. Octopus. 

And one of the biggest things that I feel hurt the movie the most is the sheer amount of bizarre mood whiplashes. You go from the unbelievably campy bit of Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker dancing around in the street and in bars like a lunatic (Emo Peter was hilarious, and I will say that over and over, but it's just so out of place compared to the rest of the movie), and then we jump into heavily-emotional romantic storylines about self-worth, with a bunch of largely bland antagonists to top it off.

There is still a bunch of good parts in the movie, and it's not a complete trash-can-fire the way 2015's Fantastic Four adaptation was. Tobey Maguire gets a decent showing, still, and JK Simmons is still fantastic in every scene he's in. It's a shame that Kirsten Dunst, James Franco and Topher Grace really didn't get much beyond muddled, confused story arcs for their respective characters. Thomas Haden Church's Sandman is honestly relatively well-acted for the stilted character arc he's given. 

Ultimately, it's still a watchable movie that I did enjoy watching through for all of the wrong reasons, but it's a far cry from the standard we expect from superhero movies nowadays or even the standard set by its predecessors.