“Spider-Man 3” boasted a hefty budget, blowing last summer’s $135.6 million “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” out of the water, but viewer beware: — money doesn’t buy good movies.
Offering a cluttered plotline and three villains, “Spider-Man 3” approached downright corniness with its cheesy climax where a teary-eyed Spider-Man/Peter Parker (Toby Maguire) attests that he and a dying Harry Osborn (James Franco) are BFFs (best friends forever).
With Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) and Peter Parker’s relationship blossoming, Parker’s life gets to be as stable as life can get for New York City’s beloved superhero, so director Sam Raimi and screenplay writer Alvin Sargent are sure to set major obstacles in front of Spidey: a relationship gone awry, three villains, a rival photographer at the Daily Bugle, a revenge-seeking ex-best friend, and an alien symbiote that darkens his personality, which to Raimi means a moppy haircut and disco-dancing down Times Square.
Of course, no movie is complete without its token domestic abuse scene, right? When a symbiote-driven Peter Parker seeks to humiliate his estranged girlfriend and would-have-been fiancé Mary Jane, he is nearly kicked out of the restaurant Mary Jane is waiting tables at after her poorly-received Broadway debut.
Parker manhandles the bouncers who attempt to neutralize him, but as he madly takes down any guy that nears him, he accidentally backhands Mary Jane in one of the most sadistically hilarious bits where a movie actually attempted to reach seriousness. I still can’t tell, however, if I would have laughed had a back-row audience member not yelled, “Keep that pimp hand strong!” Oh, silly teenage youths!
Spider-Man is not only faced with girl problems; he must also figure out a way to take down three villains — the Sandman (Thomas Haden Church), a small-time-crook-turned-strange-monster whose DNA is altered by a particle accelerator that turns him into sand; Venom emerges when Eddie Brock (Topher Grace) acquires the symbiote after Spider-Man pries it off himself because he realizes he was turning into a monster, both figuratively and literally.
Lastly, Parker’s ex-best friend Harry becomes the new Goblin to defend his father’s honor and destroy Spider-Man.Although Spider-Man is faced with the daunting task of thwarting three opponents, they aren’t all that formidable. Harry, while taking what seems to be the human growth hormone and steroids morphed into one, is still no match for Spider-Man, especially when he goes dark-suited, and I lost track of how many times he jumped ship from to good to evil and then back on Spider-Man’s side.
You never really take Venom seriously. After all, he’s played by a boy band-esque, highlight-sporting Topher Grace whose character Eddie Brock is a fraudulent photojournalist loser. And the Sandman is the key to the film’s didactic lesson, so he doesn’t evoke fear either.
Sargent, the movie’s screenplay writer, really showed his age by incorporating eyebrow-furrowing cheese-scenes where characters do the Twist and boogie-oogie-oogie ’til they just can’t boogie no more. I nearly pulled a G.W. as a scene that depicted Mary Jane and Harry shuffling and twisting to ’50s music nearly induced my tragic death-by-pesky-popcorn-kernel.
Any film worth $258 million better be life-changing. The box-office-record-shattering third installment of the Spider-Man trilogy, however, failed to be THAT movie.