Spider-Man 3: The Bad One

So here's what I don't understand. Let's say you're a filmmaker with several hit films under your belt. They weren't great movies, but they were fun, and they didn't leave the audience shaking their heads or bleeding from the ears as they left the theater. Then you're given a huge budget, possibly the biggest in film history, to go out and make another one. You've got a blank check, a ton of great material to draw from, two years to play with, and the opportunity of a lifetime. What do you do?

If you're Sam Raimi, apparently you shit out a half-assed nonsensical cheese-drenched script, pile on some so-so action, and call it a day. At least that's the impression I got from watching a preview screening of Spider-Man 3 tonight, which had me begging for a swift ending by midway through the second act. By the end of the third, I was begging for a swift death. This movie was, dare I say it, as bad as Batman Forever, and will almost certainly kill the Spider-Man franchise. If you want to avoid spoilers, stop reading now. But seriously, you'll thank me for ruining this for you so that you can be disappointed in five minutes rather than over the course of more than two hours. It's like ripping off the band-aid.

So frightfully little was done well in this movie that I simply don't know where to begin, so I will start by saying something good about it. I did like Topher Grace's take on Venom, especially considering what he had to work with. Beyond that, it was uniformly terrible. For example: what the fuck was the Sandman even doing in this movie? He was entirely tacked on, had no impact on anything, and his motivation for fighting Spider-Man at the end of the movie made absolutely no sense whatsoever. If I'm supposed to feel sorry for a character, you don't make him try to kill the hero and his girlfriend and then moments later turn around and say "I just wanted money to treat my sick daughter!" How the hell was trying to kill some people going to get you money to treat your sick daughter? That isn't a guy you let run off in the end of the movie. Time spent on him could have been spent making Venom a deeper character.

And the fact that they had to resort to giving Harry Osborn amnesia is just plain hackery, especially when you plan to reverse it later and render the parts of the movie that you spent on it completely and totally wasted time. Oh, and speaking of hackery, when you introduce an alien symbiont by having a meteor crash-land (an explosion that went completely unnoticed, by the way) a hundred yards from the hero (who has already had the unlikely experience of been bitten by a radioactive spider) and his girlfriend, you are officially a hack. And that's not even taking into account that you already had a character who's an astronaut that could have brought it back from space and introduced it to Spider-Man in any number of more plausible (within the realm of science fiction, anyway) ways.

Oh, and why, when Spider-Man decided to get rid of the symbiont, did he just happen to go to a church and hang out in a bell tower? There's a reason he did that in the comics--he'd been told by a scientist who'd studied the symbiont that it was vulnerable to intense sound. But in the movie, his scientist buddy didn't say anything about it--he just said it intensifies aggression, which... duh? You needed a lab coat to figure that out? And, since they went to the trouble of commenting on how hard it could be to remove a symbiont, why did they have him remove it at all before the bell tower scene when they could have done what they did in the comics and simply had it morph into his street clothes at will? He took the damn thing off like it was his normal costume at least twice.

I could honestly go on like this for hours with everything from major character development flaws all the way down to nitpicks, but I think that would be a waste of both my time and that of anyone reading this. I think I'll just say that, like with the Star Wars prequels, I am confident that I could have made this movie at least 300 percent better with just one day with the script. I do not understand how any of the people involved in the writing, directing, producing, acting, or any other aspect of this film could have thought that it was a good movie when they were making it, or how they can have any pride whatsoever having released it with their names on it.