Spider-Man 3
This is definitely a complicated movie for me to talk about. Of the original Spider-Man films, it is the most divisive without a doubt. I do enjoy this movie a lot, and on this watchthrough, it was no different, but there is always bad to counteract the good and this...definitely has more bad than the other two films did.
The story is kind of crazy, since there are multiple threads going on throughout the movie. There's Spider-Man, played by Tobey Maguire, being attacked by Harry Osborn, played by James Franco, in response to the death of his father, the Green Goblin. There's the admittedly still terribly written romance subplot between Peter and Mary Jane, played by Kirsten Dunst. There's the threat of the Sandman, played by Thomas Haden Church, and the fact he has personal connections to a traumatic incident in Peter's past. And then there's Venom, which, along with the aforementioned romance plot, felt shoehorned in and made this movie way too crowded. I'd argue that the Venom subplot is to Spider-Man 3 what the Dark Phoenix subplot is to X-Men: The Last Stand, where they were popular, which led to them being lazily thrown into their respective movies haphazardly.
The acting was actually pretty good, with Tobey Maguire always turning in a good performance. Even though there are memes about it, there are some points where his corrupted persona is actually believable instead of a joke. Thomas Haden Church also gave a heartfelt performance as Sandman and I really wish the movie focused more on him because I felt he didn't get enough screentime with how crowded the plot was. The performance that surprised me was James Franco, who actually turned in a really good performance throughout the movie, and he tried to give Harry actual character development so there's that. Venom was probably the worst performance in the whole movie, being played by the woefully miscast Topher Grace, who plays the character as a slimy lover type who you just hate the whole time.
Overall, this film is definitely not to the caliber of the first two Spider-Man stories, but when it does something right, it shines. There are definitely a lot of rough spots, but I'd still consider this a pretty good movie all the same.
Next time, we journey back to a team of superheroes that...honestly, I'm surprised I even get the chance to revisit them at all considering how terrible their first outing was. Get ready for the sequel that nobody asked for that is Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.
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