Spider-Man 3
“I’m gonna put some dirt in your eye”
Ok I fully went into this movie expecting a train wreck, due to public perception of the film and just the general track record of how I’ve enjoyed the Raimi trilogy. However to my surprise I think this film has a decent first 50 minutes that I was confused as to why this film has garnered so much hate. And then suddenly Peter Parker decides to put his hair over his eye in an emo look, acting like perfect symbolism for the gloriously horrible film that follows.
It’s clear that within this muddled mess of a movie there is something there, there’s a compelling story hidden underneath the bizarre hodgepodge we got. Specifically this is the story involving Sandman. Everything with him felt entertaining and had a lot of heart behind it. Ignoring the quick twists in his character at the end and the unearned redemption, his arc throughout the story was good set up just with a bad resolution.
This can be said for a lot of things in this film, there’s some great set-up that never gets resolved or big moments that have no set-up whatsoever so lack any emotion behind them. The most egregious of these is the whole 3rd act, for no real reason both the villains and the heroes team up for a lacklustre battle and then after killing people and wrecking havoc suddenly Sandman is given redemption? In isolation the 3rd act isn’t bad but with the prior context of the scenes that came before it doesn’t work at all.
The holy trinity are at there most insufferable in this film too. Peter is just completely unlikable and this isn’t because of the symbiote, Peter kisses Gwen before this ever happens on the night he’s going to propose to MJ? And then even when he has the symbiote does the movie really think that condones him backhanding MJ? He’s just completely unlikable throughout this entire film, his relationships with every single character aren’t believable so this takes away any attachment to the scenes since you’re not rooting for Peter throughout the film.
If you thought that Raimi might actually make MJ a three dimension character to end the trilogy, you’d be wrong. Poor Kirsten Dunst, MJ is literally a damsel in distress in this film and is exploited for loving Peter again. I don’t know how she still goes back to him after he SLAPPED her, kissing another girl and treats her like shit but nothing in this film makes sense. James Franco ups the insane comedic take of his Harry Osborn and while it makes no sense and it’s so stupid plot wise, I can’t say I was bored watching him. The whole amnesia stuff though was so dumb. Also slight aside but if these three were really good friends, as were told multiple times yet after three movies are never shown, why would he have not told MJ “Hey, your boyfriend killed my Dad. You should leave him”. And then his sudden turn to help MJ is so dumb and unearned, despite them teaming up being kinda sick.
There’s so many more plot points and characters I could get to that just don’t add up, but as an example of how bad the writing of this film is, they introduce Gwen Stacy, an iconic Spider-Man character who has so much backstory in the comics and is intrinsic to Spider-Man, and this film reduces her to a model in a science class that apparently doesn’t know science. This movie has a lot of good stupid lines though so that’s something