Disappointing - overdone, underdeveloped and just plain lazy

Rating: 4/10 (5 May 2007)

Everything that was good in Spider-Man 2 was completely undone in this installment, although its biggest flaws lie in its screenplay. As I had feared from the moment the first plot details were released, the film is way too cluttered. We jump from storyline to storyline, character to character; each so condensed in order to fit into the runtime that none are nearly as developed as they should have been. The biggest problem is that most of them seem entirely unnecessary. Harry's story, for instance, feels like it was included because the makers set up his villain for the third film at the end of the second and had no choice, and from there was just made up as they went along. Harry ends up dying way too many times and then unexplainably returning; his amnesia is utterly pointless since he ends up remembering everything, and couldn't Bernard have told him about his father's fate earlier and saved him all the grief? Gwen Stacy is almost entirely unused and is even less developed. I'm trying to remember if she had any important part in the film at all except for being part of various action sequences and nothing comes up. I honestly can barely see how the film would have changed had her character been removed completely, and she appears for so little time that we barely even know who her character is. The Flint Marko/Sandman character is also disappointingly underdeveloped. Instead of crafting a totally rounded, character-driven villain like Doc Ock in the second film, Raimi creates a totally flat and uninteresting villain who pretty much has just this one little banal reason as his motive for evil and has nothing else going for him. There are also various plot elements that just seem way too hackneyed and ridiculous you wonder if Raimi has learned any lessons from the failed comic book movies of the past. And when Harry joins forces with Spider-Man and the two literally hold hands and fight evil, I was reminded of how the introduction of the Robin character was clearly the straw that broke the camel that is the Batman franchise's back.
In terms of drama and setting, Raimi effectively chucks into the rubbish bin everything he built so well in Spider-Man 2 in terms of characters, dynamics, drama and realism and replaces them with banal, clichéd and corny material that is so over-done it comes across as worse than a daytime soap. Pretty much every character in the film cries more than once, and for the most ridiculous reasons. I was seriously right about ready to leave the theatre, go into the bathroom, return with a box of tissues and chuck it at the screen. And after having seen Spider-Man 2, I thought that Raimi knew that drama doesn't mean you need to have everyone sobbing about everything.
The film is also strangely disappointing even in the action department, and although the film is saturated with action scenes, none of them are nearly well thought out or executed well enough to have left any lasting impression at all. This is in contradiction to the action scenes in Spider-Man 2, which are some of the most memorable, well-executed and just plain fantastic in the entire genre - in particular, the train fight with Doc Ock but also others.
But the film doesn't disappoint in every aspect; there are some fields in which Raimi and his crew really hith the nail on the head. I actually liked what he did with Mary Jane's character, it's just too bad that he botched up Peter Parker's character so much that the dynamics between the two don't work at all. Also, Bruce Campbell's cameo in the film is by far his best in the trilogy and possibly the funniest part of all three films. But the single best element of the entire film was the character of Eddie Brock/Venom. Topher Grace is easily the best newcomer to the cast and may be the best cast villain of all three films. He has impeccable comic timing and makes Eddie Brock immediately likable and believable. And the character of Venom is, to begin with, a fascinating villain. But once again Raimi makes a crucial mistake and reduces Venom's part to miniscule proportions  the villain is only first introduced in the final act of the film, instead of being built up beforehand.
Ultimately, Spider-Man 3 has turned out to be a major disappointment. I can easily point at two primary reasons why the film failed to deliver. The first is laziness  Raimi and crew were simply too lazy to craft anything nearly as good or interesting as the previous installments, especially Spider-Man 2. The film is under whelming in nearly every aspect  character development and drama become flat, banal, clichéd and soapy; the action and visual style are uninspired and unimpressive; and the film's finale is probably the most unimaginative and uninteresting of all three films. On top of that, the second reason the film disappointed was that Raimi attempted to cram every plot line and character he possibly could into the film. This creates a jumbled, lazy mess that is really all over the place. The structure makes no sense, characters are painfully underdeveloped and don't get nearly enough screen time, and the whole thing just explodes in a shower of incoherency and detachment. Had the film focused exclusively on Venom, excluding both the Harry and especially the Sandman characters, perhaps it would have worked; that way, Raimi would have had more time to develop Eddie Brock and Gwen Stacy, and we would have been able to see more of Venom, who was surprisingly absent for the majority of the film and is removed from the picture just barely after he first shows up. And the high hopes I had from Raimi and the crew after the outstanding achievement that was Spider-Man 2 make the debacle all the more disappointing.