Contrary to the record-shattering norm, there are in fact really bad comic-book movies. For every Avengers, there’s a Hulk. For every Days of Future Past, there is X-Men Origins: Wolverine. And for every Spider-Man 2, there’s…well, this.
 

Spider-Man 3 was the third Spider-Man film directed by Sam Raimi and starred Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker, Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane Watson and James Franco as Harry Osborn. The film revolves around Parker and his love life with Mary Jane, when a black entity takes over his life and forces him into a life now ruled by revenge, temptation and turmoil - both inner and outer. Raimi intended there to be a fourth film afterwards, which would continue the saga, but plans were canned. After a few times watching the movie, they were right to cancel it.

To put the negatives into words, it starts with Maguire as Spider-Man. When he was first introduced in 2002, he was great. However, as time went on, he became much more of a whiner and a cry-baby. This third installment is further proof of that, as Maguire shows no charisma and/or humor in the film. He was all emotional, but emotional to an absurd degree. The jokes and humor that the writers force onto him is incredibly weird and awkward (i.e.: the dance scene) and the dramatic moments aren’t as dramatic as the writer’s think they are. Besides Peter Parker, Mary Jane Watson was a useless human being. It’s already bad enough that the movie is going out of order in terms of Spidey love interests, but at least make her interesting. Nope. Dunst doesn’t try in this movie and Mary Jane as a whole is not interesting at all. She gives nothing to the movie except a forced love triangle with Peter and Harry. Oh right, did I mention that Harry Osborn was awful in this movie? James Franco has range, we know this. He can be great…or he could be Harry Osborn in Spider-Man 3. This guy was even more of a cartoon in this than Peter Parker becomes. And his transformation into the New Goblin, named after his father the deceased Green Goblin, was so abrupt and on-the-nose that it there was no emotional investment. And the New Goblin suit was awful. It looked like a makeshift green and black ninja suit with a glider. There was no creativity used throughout the costume design team, which makes nitpicking easy.

Now to address the elephant in the room: the villains. If you ever heard someone say a movie is “pulling a Spider-Man 3”, this is where it comes from. The film suffers from being extremely over-stuffed by throwing in 3 villains at once: the aforementioned New Goblin, The Sandman and the iconic Venom. And they all are terrible. The only one that had even an inkling of character is Sandman, but it’s still a by-the-numbers “convict wants to help family but family doesn’t want it” supervillain trope that haunts villains like this. And Venom was so…SO bad. A character all of the Spider-Man fans wanted to see so badly, the studio caved in and put Venom in the movie…for a whopping 10 minutes. For that matter, the 10 minutes he was in the movie for wasn’t even anything spectacular. The fight between the iconic web-slinger and his symbiotic counterpart isn’t as compelling or interesting as the trailers suggest.

Even worse, the comedy is awkward. This is Spider-Man we are talking about: a wise-cracking smack-talker who has super spider powers. Yet, the comedy in the film is incredibly forced and horrible. Remember that infamous dance scene in the movie? Yeah, that’s about the level of comedy that this movie offers. Instead, they went with the more dramatic and serious story arc. It worked with Spider-Man 2, seeing as it is the second installment and second installments are usually the darker and more serious of the trilogy. But for the third, it’s not so much. The humor is flat, the funny slapstick humor falls even flatter, and it’s just overall awkward (see the dance scene, yet again).

But Spider-Man 3 isn’t all bad, right? Well…yes, yes it is. But there is some minor good in it. The best thing this movie had going for it was the action, which is by far some of the cleanest action sequences in a Spider-Man film. It’s fast, electric and all the other awesome things that make action scenes awesome. Also, while most of the movie suffers because of this, adding the symbiote in the movie was a pretty bold decision. The symbiote is regarded as one of the major parts of the character of Spider-Man. To see it on screen fulfills that fan part in me that wanted to see that. Now how the movie became a heaping trainwreck afterwards, we will never know.

Even with the incredible action, Spider-Man 3 is a bad movie. I mean it’s horrible. Stale characters, failed attempts to introduce new ones, awkward humor and an over-stuffed third act makes it one of the worst superhero movies out there. It’s a great thing that, in time, Marc Webb and the Russo brothers got ahold of the wall crawler when they did. If not, we would have been stuck with this poorly-made mess of a film.