Spider-man 3 (Sam Raimi, 2007)
There’s a really good scene at the end of Sam Raimi’s second Spider-man film that embodies everything I liked about that film and hoped for from the third one. Peter Parker, having battled with this belief that he can’t balance his life as Spider-man with his relationship with childhood sweetheart Mary Jane Watson, has just been told by Mary Jane that he can have it all. The happy ending of that film is that Mary Jane declares she will stand by his side, despite all the compromises this will involve. Just as they kiss, there’s a siren outside the window, which distracts Peter. “Go get ’em, tiger,” says Mary Jane, and we get an exultant shot of Spider-man whooping in joy as he jubilantly swings down the street. Yet Raimi doesn’t finish on that shot. Instead he cuts back to Mary Jane, watching him go, as doubt spreads across her face, and it’s on that note of ambiguity that Raimi rolls the end credits. It’s a little thing, but it’s a sign of the extra thought and attention to character that distinguishes the best genre movies. Those kind of small touches made Spider-man 2 one of the best genre films of recent years, and had me eager to see how Raimi would resolve his plot threads in third instalment. So it’s really disappointing that Spider-man 3 has turned out to be a bit of a mess.
You get the feeling that Raimi has decided this will be his last Spider-man film, as the script he has cooked up with his brother Ivan Raimi and Alvin Sargent seems overstuffed with things he was dying to get done before he moved on. In addition to further exploring Peter and Mary Jane’s relationship, Spider-man must confront not one or two but three main villains, as well as conquering his own internal demons. There’s the confrontation foreshadowed in Spider-man 2 between Peter and his friend Harry Osborn, who has become the new Green Goblin (although, thankfully, the Goblin’s costume is much less Power Ranger-ish this time around). There’s also the Sandman, the new alias of escaped criminal Flint Marko after he has been converted into sand by (another) disastrous physics experiment. And there’s Venom, a kind of anti-Spiderman caused when an alien symbiote engulfs one of Peter Parker’s professional rivals.
This is way too much for one movie, and indeed online reports suggest both that Venom was shoehorned by producers into the movie against Raimi’s wishes, and that co-screenwriter Sargent contemplated splitting the movie into two, the way the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels were done. I can imagine that approach working a lot better. As it is, the film awkwardly alternates action and exposition in a manner far removed from the confident control of narrative Raimi and Sargent demonstrated in Spider-man 2. The whole plot hangs together on coincidence and contrivance. For example, early in the movie Peter / Spider-man must save some imperilled fashion models from a tall building when a crane runs haywire. The most imperilled is Gwen Stacy, who just happens to be Peter Parker’s lab partner. Gwen Stacy’s policeman father Captain Stacy just happens to be on the scene, and he also just happens to be the policeman following up the death of Peter’s uncle. Gwen’s boyfriend Eddie Brock just happens to be at the scene as well, and also just happens to be Peter’s chief rival at the Daily Bugle. He also later just happens to be in the deserted church when Peter Parker removes the alien symbiote, which just happened to fall out of the sky metres away from Peter… and so on. You can get away with the odd coincidence in a comic book movie, but Spider-man 3 stretches this faith well past breaking point. It also cheats on two really important plot-points. First, it retrospectively changes key events of the first film to better link the Sandman with Peter Parker. And secondly, it uses very shoddy means to give Harry Osborn some key information about what happened to his father. (Frustratingly, it would have been both more logical and dramatically effective for Peter to make the same revelation directly).
These coincidences are there essentially as short-cuts, allowing Raimi to get from point A to point B with minimal exposition. He needs help in getting there because the film is so overstuffed with villains and action scenes. I thought the original Spider-man reversed the usual trend of Hollywood films in that it had good plot and characterisation but not enough action; the second was so good because it managed to keep the affinity for the characters while adding some really good action set-pieces. Spider-man 3 sees the balance tip the other way, with action sequences aplenty but a completely dysfunctional plot. But even the action is unsatisfying: Raimi’s setpieces are grander than ever in conception, but they aren’t better filmed. Raimi, like so many other filmmakers before him, resorts to overlay shaky and choppily edited action sequences, and there’s nothing here anywhere near as exhilarating as the train fight in Spider-man 2.
It’s a shame, because there are good things sprinkled all through the film that would have worked well if the screenplay had been more focussed and if Raimi had been at the top of his game. Thomas Haden Church, who has clearly been pumping some iron, is a suitably morose Sandman, and you get the feeling Topher Grace could have done quite a lot with Eddie Brock if he had had a few more scenes. Series regular J.K Simmons, as Daily Bugle editor J. Jonah Jameson, is as scene-stealing as ever, while Bruce Campbell has the best of his three cameos in the series, this time as an obliging maître d’ at a snooty restaurant. The Superman 3-ish idea of goodie two-shoes Peter Parker battling the darker side of his nature is also a really good one. Yet here, too, the execution comes unstuck. Jiving on the symbiote’s bad vibes, Parker struts down the streets in a Travolta-esque fashion and puts on a musical display for Mary Jane at a jazz club: the scenes should have an infectious glee about them, but Raimi doesn’t have the musical instincts to pull them off. Instead, the whole plot point turns sour, with the previously charismatic Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst both coming across as petulant and dislikeable.
That some of these plot points failed to work might not have been easy to foresee. But it is difficult to see how the more fundamental plot problems went unfixed, unless as I’ve suggested it was Raimi’s desire simply to include all of his ideas in one final splurge. If these plot points had been done over two movies, the series could have been resolved in a much better manner: the showdowns with Harry and Venom could each have had their due importance, rather than redundantly cancelling each other out. Of course, Sony could well yet make a Spider-man 4, but it’s difficult to imagine Raimi wanting to be involved (a fourth film would likely take him to very near a decade of working on the series). Even if he was, it is difficult to imagine the fourth would sit comfortably with the earlier films in the series, since this film has tied up – squandered, really – so many of the plot threads carefully planted in the first two films.
As for me, I think my double DVD of the first two films will represent the franchise. Spidey can go out on a high, and that evocative conclusion of Spider-man 2, with its alluring mix of promise and doubt, can be the end-point.