Spider-Man 3 (2007)

Spider-Man 3 (2007)

Release Date: May 4, 2007

After Spider-Man 2 did so well, expectations were high for the next film. As it turns out, they were too high, as Spider-Man 3 unfortunately can’t stand up to them.

This time around, Peter Parker has stopped being the eternal loser. Things are finally looking up for him, as New York loves Spider-Man (the Daily Bugle aside, of course), he’s doing well at university, and he’s decided that he wants to ask Mary Jane to marry him. However, his bad mojo has been transferred to Mary Jane instead, as she gets panned in the reviews for her latest play (aside from the one critic who said Boourns instead of Boo), causing her role to be recast. Not only that, but Harry Osborn is being a dickweed as ever. After finding his dad’s secret weapons room, Harry has used his dad’s superpower-inducing gas on himself to become the imaginatively named New Goblin. Nu Goblin attacks Peter, but Peter wins the fight, giving Goblin 2.0 amnesia and causing Harry to stop being a dickweed.

Meanwhile, small-time criminal Flint Marko has escaped from prison, and decides to hide from them in an active particle accelerator, as you do. The resulting comic science turns Flint into the Sandman, giving him power over sand and a lethal right hook. While that’s going on, a mysterious black goo falls from space and follows Peter to his apartment. In the middle of all this, the Daily Bugle has hired a douchey new photographer, Eddie Brock, who intends on taking Peter’s job. On top of all that, Mary Jane suspects Peter of having an affair with his classmate Gwen Stacy after he gives her the upside down kiss in public. Peter eventually finds that he has a new black suit, which makes him forget his problems and feel much better when he wears it, at the cost of making him angrier, cockier and more aggressive the longer he wears it.

Oh my God hotness, I wanna bang you!

Through the magic of retcons, it is revealed that Uncle Ben was killed not by a robber, but by Flint Marko. Peter tracks him down and covers him in water, making him wash away. Then, he finds out that Eddie Brock has been faking his Spider-Man by doctoring old ones, and gets Brock fired, ruining his reputation. Now the only place that'll take Brock is gaming journalism, and he won't go back there. He worked his way up from the bottom dammit! Peter’s feeling good about himself again, causing him to…

Wait. What’s that? Is he dancing? What is this and why is it in my Spider-Man movie?!? No! No I’ve had it! I can’t take this anymore!

Peter realises how much of a monster he’s become when he hits Mary Jane, driving her into the arms of Harry Osborn. What he doesn’t know is that Harry has remembered that he hates Peter, and had concocted a revenge plot that involves Diet Goblin blackmailing Mary Jane into leaving Peter just prior to him hitting her. Peter blames himself because of this, and finally realises that the black suit is what’s making him angrier. He heads to the church to take the suit off, but the black goo refuses to come off until the bell rings, weakening it enough that Peter can rip it off his body. Meanwhile, Eddie Brock is also at the church. Having found himself almost unemployable, Eddie is suffering a crisis of faith, so he prays that Peter Parker will be killed.

Eddie hears the racket Peter is making and goes to investigate, just as the black goo leaves Peter and attaches to Eddie instead. Eddie, or Venom as he calls himself now, forges an alliance with Sandman, who had gotten better a while back and was enjoying a smoke break with Hulk’s dad and Multiple Man while he was waiting for the movie to remember him. Venom then kidnaps Mary Jane as bait to lure Spider-Man towards him and Sandman, allowing them to beat him to a pulp. They do that, but Harry arrives in his Cyborg Ninja getup to save Mary Jane himself, and is a good enough sport to help Spidey while he’s at it. Sandman is defeated, but Venom puts up more of a fight and succeeds in fatally injuring Grey Fox by stabbing him with his own glider. At least it’s better than being crushed underfoot by a Metal Gear… Remembering how he got the black suit off him, Peter bangs some metal pipes together to separate the Venom goo from Eddie and prepares to destroy it with one of Goblinder II: The Quickening’s bombs, but Eddie tries to save the goo from the bomb, which gets him blown up too. Sandman appears and explains to Peter that he hadn’t meant to shoot Uncle Ben, the robber surprised him while he had his finger on the trigger and Ben was telling him to go home and be a family man. Sandman also explains that he was only breaking the law to pay for his sick daughter’s medical bills. Peter forgives Sandman and he leaves.

If you thought X-Men: The Last Stand having two main plots was too much, then hoo boy, you ain’t seen nothing yet! Spider-Man 3 has five, count ‘em, five plots! The black suit, Mary Jane and Gwen Stacy, Eddie Brock, Sandman and Harry Osborn plots are all jostling for attention. The Mary Jane and Harry plots wouldn’t be out of place in a teen soap opera. None of Mary Jane, Harry or Peter come out of their love triangle looking good. Mary Jane tries to tear down Peter when he’s happy and then harasses him for having female friends besides her, Harry tries to kill Peter and his amnesia is a convenient cliché, and Peter becomes an asshole, with his behaviour on his date with Gwen in particular being a dick move. That is, of course, unless Peter deliberately drove Gwen away for her safety because, if they’d stayed together, some nutjob in a Halloween costume would have dropped her off a bridge. The only thing that’s missing is a theme song, so I’ve taken the liberty of providing one. I don’t wanna wait, for our liiiives to be oveeeer…

Sandman’s plot is better, as he provides a villain archetype that hasn’t been seen in this series before- that of a villain who commits crimes for sympathetic reasons. His sand-based powers are also a good choice in terms of potential for set-pieces and visual effects. The scene where he forms for the first time after the experiment is the best scene in the film. A side effect of this is that since Sandman doesn’t bleed, and reforms after an injury, Peter can be as violent towards him as he likes, which helps sell the black suit when Peter is doing things like holding Sandman’s face against a moving train, sanding it down. (Get it? Sanding? Sand? I’ll be here all week.) Less successful is retconning him into Spider-Man’s origin. Spider-Man’s origin is up there with Batman and Superman for iconic origin stories everyone knows through pop-cultural osmosis, and this makes it needlessly convoluted, particularly as in the comics, Sandman has no personal connection to Peter Parker. Spider-Man 2 making a personal connection between Peter and Doc Ock worked because it was done in a natural way. Here, it feels forced, like they read the Big Book of Comic Book Movie Rules and found out that the villain must always have a connection to the hero.

The handling of the black suit is mixed. It works well at times, like when Spider-Man uses more violent, more aggressive tactics to fight his enemies. It doesn’t work as well when Peter is being influenced by it because… just scroll up. I had an existential crisis last time, and I don’t want to relapse! When Peter is under the influence of the black suit, his hair seems to change from brown to black, he has black eyeshadow around his eyes, and his hairstyle is slightly different. I’m not sure if this actually is the case, or if it was just my eyes playing tricks on me, but it is quite amusing that Goth Peter looks a bit like Justin Bieber. Goth Peter is a man prone to lashing out at others and doing stupid things that hurt his standing with others, again like Justin Bieber. It must be the gothmusic he listens to.

Unfortunately, Venom is very poorly handled. First, he’s hastily introduced in the final 20 minutes, which is a big disappointment since Venom is one of Spider-Man’s most popular foes, an A-Tier member of the Rogue’s Gallery in terms of threat and prominence. He’s a big enough character that he could have been the main villain of a film. That would have been forgivable if Venom was done well, but he isn’t. Eddie Brock is petty and vindictive, and these traits carry over to the film’s portrayal of Venom. Combined with his smaller-than-usual stature, Venom’s intimidation factor is noticeably diminished. He doesn’t seem to have any ambition, as all he’s interested in is getting revenge on Peter Parker and putting one over on him. The more sympathetic traits of Eddie Brock from the comics are excised, which highlights Venom’s wasted potential. In hindsight this is irrelevant, as there was no sequel, but Eddie could have been kept around and possibly teamed up with Spider-Man as he does in the comics when facing a greater threat. This one is particularly frustrating if the rumours about the villains of the cancelled Spider-Man 4 are true. (More on that later.)

I haven’t praised the camera work before, so I’ll do it now, since this is my last chance. The camera work is great at showing Spider-Man swing across the city, swooping and soaring around to follow the Webslinger. The same was true of the first two films, but this time, there are several set-pieces involving Spider-Man avoiding falling debris or using it to his advantage to get around. The camera work helps make these scenes look more visually exciting and take advantage of Spidey’s athleticism.

Spider-Man 3 falls into the same trap that X-Men: The Last Stand did. It tries to outdo the previous film, but it ends up doing too much and losing focus, causing the film’s quality to suffer. It’s a real shame that this continuity couldn’t have gone out on a higher note.

Stan Lee Spotter and Brucie Bonus: Stan Lee appears as a Spider-Fan who says to Peter “I guess one person can make a difference. Nuff said.” This is arguably the most heartwarming Stan Lee cameo, and for that reason, it’s one of my favourites. Bruce Campbell appears as the waiter at the restaurant where Peter intends to propose to Mary Jane. Having screwed Peter over in the second film, it’s heartening to see that Bruce wishes to atone for his past sins.

Next Time: I wondered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o’er vales and hills.

Bonus: There was going to be a fourth Spider-Man film, intended for release in 2011. It was eventually cancelled in favour of the Amazing Spider-Man because director Sam Raimi wasn’t happy with Spider-Man 3 and wasn’t convinced that Spider-Man 4 would turn out better in the time he was given to work with, so he quit and took Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst with him. The rumours of Spider-Man 4’s content would suggest that lessons hadn’t been learned from Spider-Man 3.

This one would have featured the Vulture, a man in a bird costume, as the main villain. He would have been played by John Malkovich, allowing John Malkovich to stop being John Malkovich for the duration of filming. The film would have also featured Felicia Hardy, better known as the Black Cat, except here she would have not have the Black Cat. Instead she would have been the Vulture’s daughter, despite having nothing to do with him in the comics, and after his death, she would take up the mantle of the Vulturess. Other villains (yes, there were more,) included Mysterio, a master of illusions who would have been played by Bruce Campbell, the Lizard, who had been foreshadowed in Spider-Man 2 and 3, which featured his regular counterpart Dr Curt Connors as a minor character, and Carnage. Carnage is the one fan art latched on to, and the one whose presence I alluded to earlier in reference to Venom’s wasted potential. Carnage is what happens when a Symbiote (the aforementioned black space goo) bonds with a serial killer who has no redeeming qualities. He is so evil that Spider-Man has called for help whenever Carnage is on the warpath, and more than once, that help has come from Venom. Given how badly Venom was botched, I’m not convinced Carnage would have turned out better.

In addition to all that, the film would have seen Peter cheat on Mary Jane by starting an affair with Felicia, and at the end of the film, Mary Jane would have found out about Peter’s infidelity, moved away and left Peter for good, but not without telling him that she was pregnant with his child. The previous films have established quite clearly that Mary Jane means the world to Peter, so the idea that he would cheat on her is out of character for him, even if he has been romantically linked with Felicia before. For all the grief the Amazing Spider-Man films get, they’re preferable to Spider-Man 4, which sounded like a disaster in the making. It’s safe to say we dodged a bullet on this one. The only thing of value that was lost was Bruce Campbell as Mysterio. That is sad enough to justify sad music.

One of the better looking Spider-Man 4 fan posters. This one could pass as real.