My Movie Review on Spider-Man 3 (2007) · 2:37pm Apr 3rd, 2020
Aloha, my friends.
This is your friendly film, TV show, and episode reporter here with another review.
Today, for my 133rd film analysis, I'm gonna be giving you guys my take of "Spider-Man 3 (2007)".
Here's the rundown of it:
Peter Parker and M.J. seem to finally be on the right track in their complicated relationship. Just when things seem to have quieted down in New York, though, a three-package deal of trouble comes after the two of them. The first being Harry, who decides to give himself performance enhancers in order to kill Peter and avenge his father; the second being a thug named Flint Marko, who later becomes the Sandman and is said to be the "true killer" of Peter's uncle; and the third being a symbiote from outer space, which latches itself to Peter and influences him into doing despicable things.
The worst part of it all is that the relationship between Peter and Mary seems to once again be in danger of cracking.
Will Peter and Mary ever work things out and face the dangers ahead of them? Or not?
In all honesty, I was rather reluctant to ever see this movie. It was mainly because of the rather mixed to negative reputation it had and due to things I heard about it. However, I also wanted to have my own opinion on it, and I felt that it wouldn't be fair not to see it. So, I decided to watch it on Netflix while I had the chance to do so.
Sadly, this film was what I expected it to be: Mediocre. I mean, nothing about this movie was interesting and it hardly put a smile on my face.
For instance, compared to the previous two movies, the CGI was hardly an appealing sight to behold. Every step of the way, it was so easy to tell that things like Spider-Man's swinging above the city and the monstrous appearance of the Sandman were done by computer. It was as if the effects team was hardly giving their all, like they didn't care whether everything would look good or not or were just plain lazy.
The direction by Sam Raimi, the story by him and Ivan Raimi, and the screenplay by both Raimi brothers and Alvin Sargent, hardly did the film any favors, that's for sure.
I definitely won't lie, the part where Flint tells Peter what happened and the events following it were heart-tugging, and it had great morals about revenge, hate, and forgiveness. But, none of that was able to make up for the film's overall lackluster storytelling.
Having more than one antagonist was intriguing, but the film seemed to be getting taken all over the place due to the huge amount of characters, subplots, and twists and turns it had. In several ways, all of what I just mentioned and how it came out was like five stories crammed into one. It was also as if the writing team built the story off of multiple plot pieces that barely helped everything connect. The fact that Raimi even decided to retcon the robber in the first movie as Uncle Ben's killer by saying that the Sandman killed him made me wonder if the Raimis and Sargent were either desperate to make things surprising and intriguing or something else, because I couldn't understand how that was possible. The jokes that were incorporated throughout the film were lacking as well, as they were not only flat but extremely mean-spirited, like the film team was picking on the characters.
At the most, the character development was decent, and the performances of the cast were okay.
But, with the exceptions of Tobey Maguire, who at least brought a sense of professionalism to the title character, and Thomas Haden Church, who helped the character of Flint Marko/Sandman be as fully-realized and three-dimensional as possible...the cast appeared to be bored and were wanting to be somewhere else more than anything. For instance, J.K. Simmons seemed awfully unhappy and didn't look like he was having any fun working on this movie, and the revelation that character J. Jonah Jameson was overall getting treated like a punching bag with little meaningful purpose definitely didn't help any.
It also infuriated me how much of a jerk and bonehead Peter was being throughout the movie. I mean, for a while he was the guy that I found to be as irresistibly likable as before. But then, Peter suddenly went out of character right before he made his appearance as Spider-Man to receive the key to the city, hardly even thinking about how M.J. would feel and not exactly being what many would call "Your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man".
With the exception of Sandman, none of the film's new characters were ones that I found to be memorable or interesting. I can hardly remember the character of Gwen Stacy, and whatever role she had just didn't seem to be entirely significant or important in the long run. Likewise, the character of Eddie Brock was my least favorite character of this film, and the performance of Topher Grace was...rather irritable among others.
As for the music by Christopher Young...all I can say is that no matter how hard he tried Young just didn't seem to make the music as grippingly compelling or entertaining as Danny Elfman's work in the previous two films. He did obviously try his best, but his music was hardly what I found to be Oscar-worthy.
In the end, "Spider-Man 3 (2007)" does have its positive elements, but the film overall...was a painful step back from its awesome predecessors. As far as I'm concerned, "Spider-Man 2" was a better conclusion to the series by Sam Raimi, and this film hardly needed to be made.
So, I rate "Spider-Man 3 (2007)" two out of five stars.
Yeah, this is the one that most people generally agree to be the weak one.
As for me, it's not great, but it didn't quite live down to how bad everybody said it was for me. And there were quite a few things that I liked about it. The music is great, I like Harry's New Goblin look, Sandman's emergence is absolutely phenomenal and actually kinda heart-tugging (when you can make a pile of sand shaped like a man go from a look of sorrow to determination, you know you're doing something right), and while Venom himself was kinda lackluster, the Symbiote on its own was downright nightmarish at times. I will forever maintain that the scene where Peter rids himself of the Symbiote is the best scene in the whole movie.
Personally, though, if the Sandman arc had been omitted entirely, and it just focused on Harry and Peter's newfound rivalry and the Venom arc, I would have liked it a lot better.
But hey. At least this film is more coherent than The Amazing Spider-Man 2.
Peter Parker dancing has become a staple hallmark of why this movie is bad, but I just think it's so funny. One of the only funny things about this movie.
This all led to Spider-Man being pushed to the MCU, after Marc Webb repeated the same mistake, twice.
Still Sony owns the rights.
Least they brought back J.K. Simmons.
I know Spider-Man 3 is my least favorite sequel in the entire trilogy, but in my opinion, I kinda like it because Venom is my favorite Spider-Man super-villain because of how vicious and menacing he is.
When I first saw this film, I wasn't dissatisfied with it by its results, though I was sad that Peter and MJ. Of course if you feel things should've been improved then you can blame Sony for meddling with the creative process of the film. From what I've read Sam Reimi felt pressured from Sony with the 3rd entry and it frustrated him greatly.
The movie had a lot of goof moving parts and all of them were executed rather well, but to me it feels like too many moving parts.