Topher Grace as Venom? What were they thinking?

Rating: 6/10 (11 May 2007)

Plot in a nutshell: picking up where #2 left off - or maybe a year or so after #2 - it almost looks like Peter Parker's life has turned around for the better. He's excelling in his studies despite being hit with spitballs by lesser intellects (spitballs? come on Sam, even first graders don't do that anymore!), he has the love of his life, Mary-Jane Watson by his side, MJ just got the lead role in a Broadway musical, he's thinking of popping the question to her, and New York is loving his alter ego, Spider-Man. After the first showing of MJ's play, they enjoy a moment in a big web, staring at the moon, being romantic and affectionate towards each other, so for our hero, life is finally good.
But then the real world brings Pete and MJ's fantasy world crashing down around them. Old friend Harry Osborne is still out to avenge his father, Norman's death, as Norman died as Green Goblin against Spidey - derailed only by a brief memory loss - MJ gets fired from her play due to bad critical response over her singing ability or lack thereof, Peter is so high on the love he's getting from the NY populace that he's not being quite as sensitive to her as he should while she's not giving him the grounding he needs, and Gwen Stacy, a cute classmate of Peter's, seems to have her eye on him. To make things worse, Peter learns that a villain named Flint Marko, now the mutated Sandman, was the real killer of Uncle Ben ala Joker killing Batman's parents in the 1989 Batman film - though Sandman reveals it was an accident - and Peter's spot at the Daily Bugle is now being threatened by a smarmy rival photographer named Eddie Brock Jr. Then Pete's Spider-Man suit gets slimed with black goo that turns out to be an alien symbiont, that augments his powers as well as his aggression. When Peter finally realizes what the black symbiont is doing to him and what it will cost him, he rids himself of it in a church, using the noise of the ringing bell to knock it off - only to have it fall on Brock, who came to the church to pray for Peter's death by God's hand after Peter got him fired for submitting photo-shopped pictures of Spider-Man doing evil. This results in the creation of Venom, who allies himself with Sandman to kill Spider-Man. Who will survive? While it stands head and shoulders above last year's barely broke even super-turkey "Superman Returns", a super-heroic dud if there ever was one, Spider-Man 3 suffers from the same problems that plagued last year's runaway swashbuckler hit sequel "Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man's Chest" in that it over-stuffs itself and loses some of the idiosyncrasies that made the first go around so appealing, and also works against its themes of hubris and forgiveness. The actors do their best, but the material isn't up to par. Maguire appears to be having fun during his "dark" montage (the walk down the streets while pointing and pelvic thrusting at women who look at him with disgust obviously meant as a dark flip-side to the lighthearted 'Raindrops' montage of #2), but his fling with his dark side really should have been handled more seriously. Dunst, not the greatest actress by any means, gives her all but the film isn't always complimentary towards her. Franco perhaps fairs better as Harry, the friend haunted by old demons and a father's specter that he cannot shake.
Sporting what must be the worst bleach job in cinema history, natural red head Bryce Dalla Howard, almost unrecognizable with ice cream blonde hair, makes the most of the underwritten Gwen Stacy, here given a connection to Eddie Brock that never existed in either the mainstream or Ultimate Marvel universes. But Gwen, the ill-fated lover who was brutally murdered by the Green Goblin back in the 1970s, is little more than a MacGuffin, a plot device to annoy Peter and MJ.
Villains... oh there are too many. Thomas Haden Church makes the most of his Sandman character, a complex but fairly low ranking villain who gets the spotlight mostly because director Sam Raimi seems to like him, but he only appears sporadically, and the thing with him as Uncle Ben's accidental killer not only feels forced but undermines the guilt factor that drives Spider-Man.
Rail thin Topher Grace is hopelessly miscast as Brock/Venom, playing him as basically a mean, jerky version of his 70s Show character, and he's clearly in over his head because he has neither the physicality or intense range to pull it off. Grace no doubt hoped Venom would do for him what Batman did for Michael Keaton, but it just doesn't work. This is what happens when directors are forced to use characters they clearly don't like and then create watered down hybrids of them from their mainstream/Ultimate universe counterparts.
Well, the action sequences are still superb, and the film does have an obviously deep love for its title character. It's biggest crime is that it over-reaches its grasp, as seems to be the fate of so many comic book film franchises. So it's entirely great, but it's not entirely bad either.