Third outing for Spidey.

A strange black entity from another world bonds with Peter Parker and causes inner turmoil as he contends with new villains, temptations, and revenge.

Tobey Maguire: Spider-Man / Peter Parker

The third outing for Spider-Man, the third film for our beloved hero, a third outing we waited for with baited breath. So what does Spider-Man 3 deliver to us? A mixed bag thats what. It's enjoyable yes but does it offer anything new? not exactly.
The story revolves around revenge, and revenge is a powerful emotion, yet a dark descent. Peter Parker believes it's a thing to be avoided as it has turned his former ally into his most deadly nemesis. However Peter himself finds himself sucked into the web of revenge and violence as it emerges that the man who police now believe killed his uncle has just escaped. A simple feat to bring him to justice? Perhaps, but Flinto Marko has also stumbled into some sort of experiment and has been transformed into the Sandman. While battling these two foes, Parker finds a use for a black, symbiotic substance that has attached itself to his Spiderman suit, giving him great power. But is the power from this alien source as innocent as Parker hopes?

After seeing the third Pirates of the Caribbean films and being very disappointed and bored, I was enjoying the prospect of a third Spidey film. Having been impressed by both of the other two Spiderman films I was quite disappointed to find an overly busy film that offered me very little apart from special effects. These were impressive as always but (as with POTC) the ability to do so much on screen should not mean that so much has to be done. Sadly here the effects sequences are overly busy and frantic and it was hard to feel involved in the action or build a tension, in a way it was often little more than a swirling video game sequence.

''We've all done terrible things to each other, but we have to forgive each other. Or everything we ever were will mean nothing.''

The disadvantage of the effects is that the whole film does feel quite artificial, something to be expected, from a summer multiplex filler, but not something that should be embraced in the way it is here. The most glaring issue is the void inside of characters in the film because this causes so many other flaws. Flow-wise each of these characters has to be introduced and mostly this is done by handy coincidence and lazy script loop holes... i.e. Venom hits Earth just as Parker is in the woods and doesn't jump him until he happens to be in his Spider-man suit, or how, guess what, now Marko killed your Uncle, or Eddie Brock happening to be in the church where Venom leaves Parker etc. One of these is forgivable but there are so many of them that it reveals the whole thing to be build on easy narrative devices that lack sense. The writing problems continue in the way that the theme of revenge is dealt with; it could have been a real strong base for the action but instead it is very superficial with no meat on the bones; the killer for me being when Harry forgave Peter simply because his butler said "oh yeah, forgot to mention, your Dad died of his own wounds, sorry for not mentioning it sooner", at that point I got up and did a back flip.

The lack of detail in the script but an abundance of characters also means that it flows at a basic level and a lot of the fun is gone. There are still some funny moments and JJ is still a great side character but it doesn't have the buzz and energy of the other films. The cast struggle with this as well. Maguire works at the same level as the script and his inner turmoil is just as superficial and seems to be switched on or off in each scene. It doesn't help that his "evil" look is that of a temperamental emo in a mood with the World but he can't find anything in himself to improve matters. Dunst and Franco are equally as basic and they act knowing that there are no "real" people on their pages, just 2D clones of the last two films. Church is rubbish for the same reason and his final scene was as bad as he was. Grace was a weird find but his fall to revenge was too quick and easy and it robbed his end of any meaning. Simmons can do no wrong, and produces one of the funniest tablet taking scene I can recall, although another one belongs to another Campbell cameo.

Overall then it probably has just about noise and popcorn appeal to pack them in and indeed it has broken opening weekend records in the US but this does not indicate a good film, which this certainly is not. With too much going, the potential is wasted and the ideas and themes are sketched, rather than detailed. This knocks through into everything else and produces little more than a video game with cut sequences. Not terrible by any means but a massive decline in quality compared to the previous two installments.

''Whatever comes our way, whatever battle we have raging inside us, we always have a choice. My friend Harry taught me that. He chose to be the best of himself. It's the choices that make us who we are, and we can always choose to do what's right.''