Not one for the CV, Sam

Rating: 3/10 (11 May 2007)

Oh where to begin? I have been waiting very patiently for the last three years for the release of Spider-Man 3, making sure that I didn't succumb to the temptation of those forums and websites touting sneak-peeks and spoilers aplenty. I wanted this to be the trilogy's best, the full on thrill overdose promised by the tantalising finale to Spider-Man 2, so as I took my place in the cinema last Saturday evening I was, to use the vernacular, pumped! I was quietly confident that with the same main cast, director and scriptwriter in place that they could pull it off, especially with the tender loving care given to the character and story development in part 2 - the greatest superhero movie ever made, in my view.
Not only is Spider-Man 3 not the trilogy's best, it is the trilogy's worst, and by a considerable distance; I am still trying to come to terms with how Sam Raimi has manged to drop the ball so spectacularly with this film, after the excellent offerings that came before it.
Spider-Man 3 should, for the most part, have been Harry Osborn's movie. This was the climax to the intriguing story arc of a man wrestling with his soul and his conscience on discovering that has father's murderer, so he thought, had turned out to be his best friend. To give a suitable amount of time to conclude this story, with Harry's inevitable transformation into the second Goblin, and to allow for further character and plot development, one other villain, with a complementary storyline may have been do-able. In the event we got two more, and the whole thing collapsed under its own weight.
Not only was there too much story to cope with, but, and this is what completely mystifies me, the whole thing reeks of bad film-making otherwise. There were buttock clenching moments aplenty. Take, for example, the extremely clunky dialogue involving dreadfully unsubtle exposition, a very poor (and irritatingly obtrusive - especially in its clumsy re-use of some of Danny Elfman's previous work) musical score, very major and egregious plot cop-outs - Bernard the butler with the forensics qualification and an unforgivably bad sense of timing (almost two movies too late, in fact), and Doctor Connors' amazing ability to discern that the alien substance 'amplifies aggression' by having a quick peek at it under a microscope. If the symbiote loves its host so much, why does it allow Peter to take it off? and then lock it up in a trunk? To compound the mess there was a woeful (almost non-existent) level of character development (the Markos, the Staceys and Brock in particular), and, to accommodate the Sandman, some unnecessary tampering with the Uncle Ben back story, which should have been left well alone.
Wheras I was really rooting for the characters in Spider-Man 2, and was completely absorbed in Spidey's world, the third film has left me feeling detached from those same characters, with absolutely no emotional buy-in. It was shocking to realise that, by the end of the film, I didn't really care what happened to Harry, or the others for that matter. When I reflect on how I felt about Harry's dilemma at the end of Spider-Man 2, then that alone speaks absolute volumes about the sheer vacuousness of Spider-Man 3.
My advice is, if you've seen the first two and you enjoy the fact that they (the second one especially) are character driven, and a lot of time and effort is put into developing those characters to a satisfying degree, then live your life with the knowledge that they were great films and, so as not to taint your memory of them, avoid Spider-Man 3 like the plague.