Spiderman 3: The Best and Worst in the Series?

Nepotism in Hollywood has always been a problem. The most notorious example of this is when Francis Ford Coppola put his daughter, Sophia Coppola into the "Godfather 3", which lead to the worst sequel in the history of the cinema, helped along to that title by Sophia's wooden acting and lack of any charisma whatsoever. Now we have another disaster on a similar scale. The director and writer of both of the earlier Spiderman movies, Sam Raimi, called in another person to help him write "Spiderman 3". Seeing as how that person was his brother, Ivan, who never wrote any movie before in his life, who could have expected that call to turn out well?

The movie starts out strongly enough with Peter Parker (aka Spiderman), played by Tobey Maguire, in a really good mood. He has a jig in his step, his girlfriend, Mary Jane (played by Kirstin Dunst), is getting some Broadway success by singing in a play, and his grades in college could not be better. Things get a little more darker when the film shows that his once best friend, Harry Osburn (James Franco), is still very ticked-off over the fact that Spiderman killed his dad. We see this when Peter goes to the theater to watch MJ's opening night, and Harry is shown spying on Peter with a wicked smile on his face, obviously plotting some diabolical vengeance on Peter. Harry's dad, the Green Goblin, has some left-over homemade bombs that Harry has discovered, and he'd like to use them on Spiderman.

There is another villain on the prowl as well. Flint Marko (Thomas Haden Church), was the person responsible for killing Peter's Uncle Ben, played in the first movie by Cliff Robertson. He is shown escaping prison for another crime he was convicted of, and falling into a testing zone facility that is being used for a molecule dissemination experiment which transfers molecules into sand. The result of the transformation turns him into "Sandman", a new, kinder villain, who only wants to steal money so he can help his dying daughter get the medical attention he could not otherwise afford. The movie turns needlessly sentimental when the Sandman does atrocious things like attacking and killing police officers so he can escape with stolen money, and constantly brings out a small photo of his daughter which he begins to fondle like a love-sick small boy. The cgi effects and action sequences for Sandman are without a doubt the best in the Spiderman series, but the maudlin quality of the scenes, because of the dying daughter scenario, keeps you from despising and fearing Sandman, which is what having a villain in the movie is supposed to make the viewer feel, anger and rage against him, not sympathy for his plight.

The setup for the next villain, Venom/Eddie Brock (Topher Grace), could not take longer getting to the main villainous action if it tried. A meteor falls to the earth in the vicinity of Peter and MJ when they are in a make-out session, and a parasitic entity, a kind of black, gooey substance, attaches itself to the back of Peter's bike and afterwords becomes part of one of the Spiderman costumes in Peter's closet. It causes the costume to turn from red to black, and when Peter puts it on, it makes him become a very different kind of Spiderman, an anti-hero, if you will. It enhances his strength, but also makes him extremely aggressive against anybody even looking at him in the wrong way. He gets into barroom brawls with strangers, and into fights with MJ wearing the suit, and he eventually realizes it is overtaking him in the worst way. He decides to get rid of the suit and the black parasite in a nearby church steeple, and guess who is directly under him, looking up into the belfry when Peter is throwing off the parasite? You guessed it, Eddie Brock, who just happens to be in the exact same church Peter went into when he was trying to escape police. When the parasite lands on Eddie, he relishes the power that it brings him, and swears revenge on Spiderman for making him look foolish at the newspaper's offices that they both work for. This all makes the movie drag on far too long for any decent comic book movie, and most movie theater audiences should be getting tired of all the various villain set-ups right about now.

Meanwhile, the romance between Peter and MJ is going down the tubes because of yet another needless character, Gwen Stacy (Bryce Dallas-Howard), who makes MJ very jealous after a long kiss with Spiderman makes newspaper headlines. Gwen's actions feel tacked-on by the writers to satisfy a fan-boy request for another female in the series who exudes more sexuality than MJ ever could. Gwen provides nothing more than eye candy for the movie, and Dallas-Howard's acting abilities are never utilized to the fullest extent. The jealousy of Harry against the Peter/MJ pairing also makes the romance take a bad turn, but the intense action of Spiderman 3 takes a backseat to all the ridiculous romantic goings-on. Most of the hand-to-hand fighting between Spiderman and Harry are regurgitated from the first two movies, and the final battle sequences are not nearly as well-done as some of the earlier battle sequences.

The Venom fight scenes against Spiderman, while very well-done, take place way too late in the movie for all those audience members who were hoping Venom would be a major highlight of Spiderman 3. The director should have editied out 80% of the romantic murkiness of Peter/MJ to expand the Venom/Spiderman conflict, or he should have excised Sandman altogether and made Venom the only villain of the movie, allowing the fanboys to get all the Venom they could ever hope for.

The ending of the movie is ambiguous , setting the series up for yet another "will they or won't they "romance between Peter and MJ in future installments. What this franchise is badly in need of is another director's vision. It would be amazing to see what visionary directors like Alfonso Cuaron or Guillermo Del Toro could do to liven up this series into something approaching what Christopher Nolan has done for the Batman franchise. Nolan injected realism and a much-needed sense of urgency into his version of Batman with the help from Christian Bale's acting abilities. The next movie in the Spiderman series must take that same turn, or this franchise could be over and done with much quicker than Columbia Pictures and the Spiderman producers would like it to be.