Review of Spider-Man 3 (2007) by Jack S — 31 May 2014

I surprisingly don't hate Sam Raimi's third and final entry to his Spider-Man series as much as most other people do; probably because I didn't love the first two like most people did nor did invest myself emotionally into this Spider-Man series like those others.

People always seem to trash on this film and I can see why. So, what can I possibly say that hasn't already been said about it? Well, here it goes. First and foremost is the biggest and most talked about problem: the overabundance of villains.

The simple fact of the matter is that there's way too many villains, none of which that get any substantial amount of screen time nor a decent amount of character development. The new "Green Goblin" is only in the film for the beginning and doesn't show up again until the movie's more than halfway over and by that, seems pretty unnecessary.

Thomas Haden Church was pretty dedicated and subsequently was pretty good and compelling as Sandman, so good actually that he gives the only good performance among this pile of stinkers known as the cast but even he succumbs to this films extremely poor character development unfortunately.

And then there's Topher Grace who was completely and utterly miscast as Eddie Brock/Venom, was completely inaccurate to the comic books, and was only shoehorned in so Sony could rake in the big bucks at the box office due to Venom's vast popularity.

Hope it was worth selling the franchise's soul, Sony (not only do they butcher the character, but Venom is only in the movie for maybe 20 minutes, if not less) I hate to break it to you, but you HAVE to do the Venom/symbiote story arch in at least two films with that story arch being the main focus of the films before you can even think of getting the character right.

Now, let's talk about the rest of the cast. Tobey Maguire is the same old typical nerdy guy he always is once again, except when he comes across the symbiote that binds onto him and that turns him emo.

Emo Peter Parker is completely out of character and ridiculous for Tobey Maguire's version of Spider-Man or any version of Spider-Man for that matter (just watch the scenes where he's dancing through the streets of New York and you'll know what I'm talking about).

Kirsten Dunst is still the same old plain, stagnant, wooden caricature of a character she's always been. And the rest of cast is really quite forgettable and mentioning them would only come as a formality for me at this point.

And last but certainly not least, the story. The film's plot really has no focus on where it's leading to unlike its predecessors and contains way too subplots in a foolish and pointless attempt to compensate for that very problem.

It decides to do nothing for the most part and drags on constantly. And when it does decide it wants to do something, it rushes it completely. Simply put, this film is just crammed with way too many ideas and characters, and subsequently, suffers quite a bit.

I may not have liked this Spider-Man series, but it doesn't take much to see that this is easily Sam Raimi's worst film to date as well as the worst Spider-Man film in the franchise by far, hands down.