Spiderman 3 had a lot to live up to – the first film was good and the second superb. Despite keeping the same Director (Sam Raimi), this trilogy ender followed the same pattern as X-Men 3 - it was a really disappointing end to the trilogy. (Come to think of it the third Superman and Batman films were pretty disappointing too!)

**POTENTIAL SPOILERS FOR THE EARLIER FILMS IN THIS REVIEW**


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ENTER AT YOUR OWN PERIL…


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Turn back now if you don’t want to see the potential spoilers!!


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Oh well don’t say I didn’t warn you…


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My hopefulness that this might turn out to be good ended not long after the credits finished. (To be fair the credits were really nicely done and integrated one or two very short clips from the previous films, so that even if this was the first spidey film you’d seen, you’d know some of the back-story.) Anyway, we all know that Peter Parker is a mild-mannered science student who gets bitten by a spider and instead of dying gets superpowers and becomes Spiderman, and all that. This everyone knows (unless they’ve been on Pluto for a decade or so). His best friend Harry is the son of “The Green Goblin”, an evil baddie whose death at the end of the first film Harry Osborn blames on spidey. He is also is a rival love interest for Mary Jane Watson, an aspiring singer / actress caught in the middle of this little love triangle.

Near the start of the film Harry in the guise of the “New Goblin” tries to kill Spiderman, but in the course of their battle (which emphasised the obsession with visual hyperactivity of the sort that ruined X-Men 3 – there goes my hope for this movie…) he gets a bump on the head. Conveniently he loses his memory and everything seems back to normal, with friendship in the air between Harry and Peter. Meanwhile Mary Jane has a stinking review of her performance in the Theatre but Peter unwittingly makes things worse by not empathising with her, just at the point when he is planning to pop the big question to her. With the New Golbin quiet – at least for now – new villains must be afoot and we see them spring up in the form of The Sandman (who just happens to be connected with Parker’s troubled past) and Venom (whose origin I won’t tell you right now). Spiderman starts flirting with Gwen, the Police Chief’s daughter, who happens to have been previously attached to Eddie, a rival photographer who wants to get a shot of Spiderman doing something nasty so he can get the staff job at the Daily Bugle.

And some other stuff… as you can see there’s a lot going on in this movie, but unfortunately it is all very uninvolving. The magic that made Spiderman 2 so good – the exceptionally well shot action sequences and the human story behind Peter and Mary Jane – are sadly lacking. Most of the action sequences just seem too over the top (even for a superhero movie!) and some of the camerawork is severely headache-inducing (especially when the Sandman first comes to visit). There are simply too many storylines vying for your attention but none of them really hold the viewers interest – presuming the viewer is over 16, that is. The sometimes subtle and often ironic humour of the second movie is lost amid a bunch of cheap gags with only one memorable line from the whole film that I can remember – after meeting The Sandman for the first time, Peter sits and asks himself ”Where do these guys come from?”. When Peter’s personality undergoes a rather drastic change, we are shown this not for a short scene but a long drawn-out section of the movie that loses all impact.

Lots of it doesn’t make too much sense, and that which does is painfully predictable. Tobey Maguire (Peter Parker / Spiderman), Kirsten Dunst (Mary Jane Watson), Tomas Haden Church (Flint Marko / The Sandman) and Topher Grace (Eddie Brock / Venom) were all pretty nondescript, with only James Franco (Harry Osborn / New Goblin) and perhaps Bryce Dallas Howard (Gwen Stacey) giving somewhat redeemable performances. Some great acting talent in the form of J K Simmons (JJ Jameson), Rosemary Harris (May Parker) and James Crmwell (Captain Stacey) were given pitifully little screen-time and thus utterly wasted.

So, overall, I didn’t really enjoy Spiderman 3 at all. It has some good points, I suppose – the special effects are generally very good (particularly the scene where The Sandman is created), but otherwise its lacklustre script, uninteresting characters (they should be interesting… but they just aren’t…), and laudable but heavy handed moral message make for a very disappointing film. (Not having read the comics – well, not since I was about 8 anyway – I don’t remember the character “Venom” being there at all, but various fans of the comics have told me that the character in this movie bears very little relation to that in the comic.)

I’d only bother with this if you’re still desperate to see it – otherwise, at the very least save yourself some money and wait till it’s a cheap rental.


Other Information

Rating: 12A (UK) / PG-13 (USA) for sequences of intense action violence
Runtime: 140 minutes


Links

Spiderman 2

(Incidentally, before anyone rants about this, sure the second film had some things wrong with it - but overall it was excellent entertainment.)

See also: My Top Ten Superhero Movies


Recommended: No

Movie Mood: Die-hard Fans Only
Viewing Method: Other
Film Completeness: Looked complete to me.
Worst Part of this Film: Script