Spider-Man 3 (2007)
After the roaring success of the second Spider-Man movie, can
Spider-Man 3 keep the momentum going?
Pre-Existing Prejudices:
The emo one. Venomβs in it too, which means a fully CGI monster from a time when you had to spend a
lot of money for that to look good. Topher Grace is in it, and I donβt mind his low-key charm on
That 70βs Show but whether than scales up to the big screen is another matter since it has, again, been a solid decade since my eyeballs went anywhere near this cinematic extravaganza. Iβm aware this does not have a tip-top reputation but it would be nice if there were some unexpected surprises or pleasures contained herein. Letβs see if there are!
Whatβs It All About, Proley?
So! Much! Stuff! Peter wants to propose to Mary Jane β God only knows why after the last movie β but he is taken over by a symbiont from outer space! Should be exciting, right? Ermβ¦ Anyway, Spider-Man and Harry Osborn have a fight which ends with β oh dear β Harry getting partial amnesia and conveniently forgetting Peter is Spider-Man. Elsewhere, we find out the real killer of Uncle Ben is none other than petty crook Flint Marko who, after falling into an experimental particle accelerator, becomes The Sandman. He tussles with Spider-Man who defeats him via the medium of
modern dance water but the symbiont is slowly corrupting Peter, turning him into a petulant dickhead. Thereβs also some love rivalry with Gwen (yay Gwen!) while Peter gets his rival at the Daily Bugle, Eddie Brock, fired when it turns out Brock was faking pictures of Spider-Man. After a night at a jazz club Peter finally realises what the symbiont is doing to him and gets it out, only for it to bond with Eddie to become Venom. He abducts Mary Jane and locates a dried-out Marko so they can both take on Spider-Man. It all ends in a big construction-site battle where Harry saves Peter in time for a quick reconciliation but dies in the process, Brock and the symbiont get vaporised, and Mary Jane and Peter reconcile, even although Gwen is
right there.
Any Other Business:
β’ Remember how good the pacing for
Spider-Man 2 was? Hold on to those happy memories because theyβre not gonna get updated hereβ¦
β’ The battle in Central Park is pretty well done, but having Harry succumb to amnesia and handily forgetting that Peter is Spider-Man is such an unforgivably awful clichΓ© that
All My Children probably would have steered away from itβ¦
β’ The creation of The Sandman, and the effects used to bring him to life, stand up well and Thomas Haden Church gives what is by
far the best performance in the whole film. He gives The Sandman a regretful, almost melancholic edge that feels very much like a template for Thanos in the MCU but hammed up a bit less. Heβs
excellent.
β’ Good fight sequence too!
β’ And lo, the point where the whole movie goes off the rails, when it becomes clear that we haveβ¦ letβs count βemβ¦ three bad guys! 1) Harry 2) Venom 3) Sandman. Thatβs too many. Arguably two too many, in fact, but definitely one. And itβs pretty clear which one needs to go.
β’ Yes, itβs the sticky black CGI blob that turns Peter into an emo asshole. Itβs a really risky move to take your otherwise-likeable hero, turn him bad, then hope you can pull out of that tailspin to make him sympathetic again in time for your Big Movie Climax. This film does not achieve that.
β’ Cliff Robertson makes a brief cameo again playing Uncle Ben. It was his last acting role before his death in 2011.
β’ This movieβs Bruce Campbell cameo β French waiter trying to help Peter propose to MJ. Campbell is, naturally, fabulous but the whole scene is a trite, tired sit-com gag-fest where Peter nearly gets to propose then something funny (or at least βfunnyβ) happens and its stopped, then the hired musicians nearly come in but have to duck back out andβ¦ itβs all just very laboured.
β’ Yes, what happened to the breezy, easy charm of the first two movies? The comedy here is all pretty hackneyed and very little of it lands. That proposal scene is just terrible in a way nothing else in the Spider-Man movies has been, and itβs not Maguire, Dunst or Campbell that are at fault. Itβs just lazy scriptwriting.
β’ Gwen Stacey is simply great in this. She feels like a real, genuine character in a way that Mary Jane just never quite does and Bryce Dallas Howard is incredibly likeable in the role. When she realises that Peter is using her and manipulating their situation to make MJ jealous, Gwen apologises to MJ, gets up and leaves. Itβs an incredibly decent, humanising moment that really makes her seem like a proper person.
β’ The moment Peter realises heβs being corrupted by the symbiont happens when he hits Mary Jane. Really, movie?
Really? The only way that revelation could come was by violence against a woman?
β’ The answer to the question βcan Topher Grace scale up his performance for the big screen?β is no, by the way. Itβs not really his fault β the character is introduced too late and with too little screen time to care about so when heβs taken over by Venom we havenβt really been given any reason to care beyond the abstract of βoh, another bad guy for Spidey to fightβ. It would have been helpful to have Brock either have more interaction with Peter earlier on β the firing scene just isnβt enough β or, ideally, have appeared in
Spider-Man 2 so at least thereβs something that could have been built on the way the Peter/Harry rivalry has been.
β’ Grace clearly plays the Venom-possessed Brock as an addict, a fruitful approach that might actually have worked had he been given any material to work with which actually brought that out (barring his speedy death, that is).
β’ Honestly, both the black Spider-Suit and the full Venom Spider-suit look pretty good.
β’ The construction-site battle isβ¦ solid. I just canβt get away from the idea that itβs lacking something though. Itβs well shot and well-choreographed but it seems to be lacking a little flair to really elevate it to a top-flight superhero punch-up.
β’ And it all wanders back into clichΓ© when Harry gives his life to save Peter. Thatβs right, just like Doctor Octopus did in the last movie!
β’ It is nice, at least, that The Sandmanβs motives were regret and a desire to help his daughter, and itβs a definite plus that heβs allowed to escape at the end rather than being killed off. Heβs curiously sympathetic, and the movie would have benefited greatly from leaning more into this rather than have him drop out for more than half the running time.
β’ It all concludes with MJ and Peter reconciling. What a pity nobody gave us a reason to care.
In Conclusion:
Venom sucks. He sucks in
Spider-Man 3. He sucks in
Venom. He.. well, sucks. And heβs also absolutely the best example of everything that goes wrong here. Overstuffed, under-written and frequently incoherent,
Spider-Man 3 just has far too much
stuff, and Venom is the too-much-stuff that the movie simply doesnβt need. Or, indeed, have space for. The Sandman is, like Doc Ock last time out, more than enough villain for Spider-Man to deal with, especially since thereβs the whole revenge/reconciliation thing going on with Harry thatβs been running across all three of the movies. But instead we have to waste simply acres of screen-time with this CGI blob thing while it messes around with Peter, then eventually Eddie Brock, before the damn thing just gets vaporised already. The movie splits its time between the three antagonists and simply canβt find enough for each of them to do. The frustrating thing is how easy it is to see how all three of them could have worked individually when none of them do combined. Eddie Brock is a real-wold challenge to Peter β heβs got the staff job at the newspaper, Topher Grace looks handsome and in physically great condition if you need to do the whole love-rival angle somewhere, and him becoming Venom and fighting Spider-Man would mean there was a neat real-world vs Spider-world parallel. You could potentially do a lot with that. Instead Brockβs whole story is inexcusably rushed. It takes over half the movie before the symbiont gets round to bonding with Brock so we actually get Venom, and prior to that we have screeds of material where the symbiont just makes us really dislike our lead character without finding any other angle to keep the audience interested in the film. Grace turns in a decent performance here β not Alfred Molina great, obviously, but heβs clearly invested in the character and gets a good handle on him with the addiction approach. This isnβt just some TV star trying to find his big cinematic break, Grace really puts in the effort to find a good angle on what heβs being given to do but thereβs just not enough material here for him to really make that sing.
Ditto The Sandman β heβs a fantastic character here and fully worthy of his own film, but heβs defeated by Spider-Man in an (admittedly good) underground battle then vanishes for the rest of the film only turn up at the end to make a bit of extra trouble. Itβs a waste of a good character and a good performance. Across all three Spider-Man movies thereβs been a real effort to have villains who arenβt simply bad guys for the sake of being bad guys and that tradition continues here, with The Sandman being someone who actually has motivation beyond fighting Spider-Man for the sake of an action sequence, and a soulful portrayal from Thomas Haden Church that makes him an easy character to care about. That could be a terrific focus for a Spider-Man film, but no. βFocusβ is the very last thing The Sandman has. And as for Harry? Well, thatβs really where the whole emotional crux of the trilogy ought to lie. The previous two movies put real effort into building up the relationship between Peter and Harry, their rivalry and their conflicts, and why it really matters to them. And itβs all elegantly flushed down the pan here for the sake of a straightforwardly awful amnesia plot and a hacky βIβll save you!β ending just in time for some swelling strings and an all-is-forgiven pat resolution. Forgiveness has been one of the threads running through these movies, as personified by Aunt May, and thereβs a phenomenal opportunity to use that to really say something worthwhile here but we instead get the most obvious iteration of that and it undermines all that good material. It is, in fact, a complete waste of all that time and investment thatβs been used until now and it cheapens all the hard work Tobey Maguire and James Franco have put in to making it work. Weβre supposed to be moved by the sacrifice Harry makes here but it would be a hell of a lot more convincing if that wasnβt also the end to the last movie. Well, and if it wasnβt so poorly written. Three villains is too many and when none of them are properly used the overstuffing just becomes that much more obvious.
Which is a shame because there are a few bright sparks here and it certainly wouldnβt be fair to say this film has no redeeming features at all. And top of the redeeming features list is Gwen Stacey. The first
Spider-Man movie might have been a bit slow but it really took time to create characters and situations which rang true and Gwen feels like sheβs very much in that tradition. Sheβs only really on the periphery of the Spider-world but a winning performance and a few lines of dialogue are all she needs to wipe the floor with Mary Jane in terms of characters you actually want to spend time with. As with the last movie, thereβs precious little spark between MJ and Peter but between Gwen and Peter? Itβs all sparks all the time! Maguire and Howard have an instant rapport light-years away from the plodding will-they-get-engaged plot that MJ has been stuck in and they make a charming couple, even when Peter is behaving dreadfully. Had there been a fourth movie in this sequence they would have done well to send MJ off to jazz school or acting classes or something and get Gwen in as her permanent replacement. Sheβs just so much easier to spend time around. And in terms of good stuff, we get a bit more of Aunt May, which is always welcome, and her lessons in forgiveness are so clearly what this whole film should be about that itβs frustrating to see Rosemary Harris giving it her all in service of slight material. Even so, though, sheβs terrific, as is the little Uncle Ben cameo β itβs sweet without being cloying. Of course thereβs more JK Simmons as J Jonah Jameson, and thatβs never not welcome. Little bits of quality like that do help the movie along but the truth is that, for all that there are redeeming features here, the biggest sin of
Spider-Man 3 is this β for long stretches itβs simply boring.
And thatβs a slightly odd thing to say, because there is plenty of action here. The Central Park fight, the first encounter with The Sandman, the big climatic construction-site battleβ¦ thereβs plenty of eye candy. Thereβs just a sense ofβ¦ well, not seen it all before exactly, but this movie doesnβt really do anything the other movies havenβt already achieved and largely achieved better. Thereβs nothing wrong with the finale at the construction site, but itβs another big outdoors battle and we saw that last time out with the runaway train sequence. And the Queensboro Bridge sequence from the first movie. The Central Park fight is well shot but is it really any better than the big Doc Ock fight? Not especially. Itβs all fine, thereβs no implication here that anything is bad, itβs just kind ofβ¦ there. The middle section of the film is where things really struggle though because the script just doesnβt work well enough for us to care about the characters and what theyβre going through. Peterβs devolution from nice guy to asshole works in theory but itβs still pretty bland. MJ isnβt any less annoying than she was last time out so any emotional pivot thatβs going to involve us caring about something like her losing her acting job just isnβt going to land. Gwenβs great but she gets hardly any screen time. And in the middle of all that, yes, we have our hero just being insufferable while nothing much of consequence happens. Thereβs no getting away from it β itβs dull. At least when we get to Venom thereβs a bit more visual action going on but until that thereβs large tracts of the movie which are just people we donβt like / donβt care about standing around talking about things that arenβt holding anyoneβs interest. These movies donβt have to be all-action-all-the-time but they do need to present us with something interesting and whatever this is, is isnβt that.
And thatβs pretty much it. Thereβs just not a lot more to say. Itβs a shame that there isnβt a
Spider-Man 4 to course-correct the series but
Spider-Man 3 doesnβt actually give us any reason to want that. There was one planned which fell through for a variety of reasons but in a way thatβs also a good thing. For all that it doesnβt work well on screen the running plot of Harry vs Peter is concluded here and Peter does reconcile with Mary Jane, ending that plot point too. Those feel like proper conclusions and the series ends up being a trilogy which has a beginning, a middle and an end. Yes, the ending could and should have been so very much stronger than what we have, but at least they manage, just about, to form a cohesive narrative across all three entries in the series. But that still doesnβt get away from just how disappointing this film is. Itβs not a total disaster, itβs not close to being the worst superhero movie of 2007 (how could it be when
Fantastic Four spluttered its way on to cinema screens?) but it also ought to have been so much better. Too much material and too little script-editing means we have by far the worst of the MaguireVerse movies and little reason to feel sad that we never got another one. Still, Maguire has proven himself to be great in the role and the series as a whole has shown that, in the 21st Century, Spider-Man can really work as a live-action superhero. The question for the next two Spider-Man movies is that now we know they can work β will they?
Script vs Length: More Or Less?Less! Please, for the love of all that is good, less! Just get Venom out of the script and you would have a shorter, leaner movie that would have time to spend on the characters that actually work. This movie is two hours and nineteen minutes long. It does not need to be two hours and nineteen minutes long. Or at least if it does it needs to be structured a hell of a lot better than this movie is. Venom is never more than an irritating distraction so jettisoning that whole plotline while focusing on the Peter/Harry rivalry and using The Sandman as the tent-pole villain would be so much more effective. You could easily shave thirty minutes of the run-time and still have plenty of space for those two storylines to breathe. By the time we get to the conclusion the wheezing labours of a movie thatβs clearly out of breath and ideas is just distracting, and so much of the middle section of this film is just dull. The expert pacing of
Spider-Man 2 really is a distant memory now.
How Convincing Does This Webslinger Look?
Oh fine. Good, even. Of course, weβre presented with not one but two webslingers this time out, what with the whole Black! Spider! Suit! thing, but it looks good. A bit emo-silly, perhaps, and itβs not a hugely inventive way of externalising the darkness thatβs meant to be consuming Peter β indeed itβs a dispiritingly literal one β but as an on-screen costume it looks good, and the special effects of the suit going dark work well. By the time the symbiont takes over Eddie Brock and has more of a standalone suit it gets a bit daft β the size of the spider on the suit is getting ridiculous, though nothing compared to whatβs coming up next time out β but it works well in a comic-book-brought-to-life way. Venomβs tongue never looks like anything other than the CGI it clearly is but the actual suit itself is fine.
Villainometer β How Does This Movieβs Plan Seem And How Goes The Costuming?
Plan?
Plan? Ha! As if thereβs anything as straightforward as a plan in this mess! Venomβs plan is non-existent, it just wants to be Venom. It takes over Peter, then takes over Brock, then gets blown up. The end. The Tom Hardy-starring
Venom* movie wasnβt a piece of cinema to last all time but even it managed to get this more or less right. Technically of course itβs a revenge plot because Eddie wants payback for Peter getting him fired but that whole thread never worked anyway so really, who cares? Venom is Venom is Venom is dead. Moving onβ¦ Thereβs also that other revenge plot, whereby Harry wants his revenge on Peter a-ha-ha-ha-ha! And then doesnβt and sacrifices himself. I believe I have said enough on this already but yeah β itβs not brought to the most elegant of conclusions. That only leaves The Sandman, who actually has proper motivation and, if he doesnβt exactly have a
plan as such does at least have a reason to be doing what heβs doing. His desire to provide for a daughter he can no longer help in any other way is clear, simple motivation that works for the character and when heβs caught stealing to achieve this it makes sense. Then he vanishes. Then heβs back at the end of the film for some double jeopardy. Of all the swirling mess of bad guys he is the one that comes closest to making sense β but plan? That might be stretching things a bit far. As for costuming, well, as mentioned Venom looks fine. The Sandman looks like any blue-collar labourer when in human for and, erm, sand when not so thereβs just not a lot to say there. And weβve seen the Green Goblin / New Goblin stuff before β it looks fine and as good as it did the first time out.
* You know, thatβs the second time Iβve bagged on that movie but itβs really not all
that bad. Hardyβs surprisingly good at playing the comedy in it and though the pacing of the film is poor itβs not a terrible way of spending a couple of hours even though it should have been a bit better. 55% / B- sort of rage, Iβd say.
What Else Happened In 2007?The Simpsons make the jump from the small screen to the big one in the inventively-titled
The Simpsons Movie. Despite its reputation itβs the eighth most popular film of the year β
Spider-Man 3 comes in as the third most popular, appropriately, with
Pirates Of The Caribbean β At Worldβs End taking the top spot. Zack Snyder makes his mark with the absurdly homo-erotic (and also just straightforwardly absurd)
300 and, speaking of queens, Helen Mirren gets the role of Elizabeth II Monarchical Boogaloo in
The Queen. Quentin Tarantino goes all
Grindhouse and Simon Pegg and Nick Frost give us the glorious
Hot Fuzz. Judd Apatow gets
Knocked Up and Michael Bay kicks off the whole
Transformers thing thatβs really going to dominate the CGI-go-boom market for a while. Not all fantasy films are equal though β droopy flop
Beowulf drips on to screens towards the end of the year, and in superhero movies the genuinely dreadful
Fantastic Four mark their swift arrival/departure. This yearβs Oscar gets snapped up by the Cohen brother for the classic
No Country For Old Men and Tim Burton is all about
Sweeny Todd. Wes Anderson gives us
The Darjeeling Limited and, at the other end of the scale, Nicholas Cage
is Ghost Rider. Rankings:
1.
Spider-Man 2
2.
Spider-Man3.
Spider-Man 3Next Time On Prole Hole vs Spider-Manβ¦
We leave the MaguireVerse behind and saunter on over for our first encounter with the GarfieldVerse. No lasagne required. Unless youβre into that.