There are times when I enjoy being wrong. Not that failure in any field is energizing, but when one is wrong about a presupposition, based upon an especially large body of evidence that seems to support one's bias, it is a positive, especially when that bias was toward the negative. Having recently watched The Dark Knight, and seen that it is a poor followup to Batman Begins, and having seen how well made and written the first two Spider-Man films were (even if the second was not as good as the first), my expectation was that Spider-Man 3 would continue the line of declension downward toward the Hollywood Lowest Common Denominator followed by even the few promising film franchises out there, like The Chronicles Of Narnia films. This expectation was bolstered by reading the negative reviews given to the film by most critics.
Happily, they were wrong. While the second film in this franchise was certainly not a bad film, Spider-Man 3, is better, and just misses out on being better than the first because it tries to jam too many plot points into its 139 minute long running time. Literally, this film could have been three separate action films: Spidey vs. The Sandman, Spidey vs. Venom, Spidey vs. The Green Goblin 2, and Peter Parker vs. Mary Jane Watson, a domestic drama.
Still, it’s the screenplay’s strengths in dialogue and characterization that lift this, and the Spider-Man franchise, above all other superhero comers. This fact rests squarely on the screenplay put forth by director Sam Raimi, and his two co-writers, Ivan Raimi and Alvin Sargent. As the nostrum goes, all good films have good scripts. No, this is not a great film, in the sense that we are talking about art that greatly deals with deep ideas. But it is well above most Hollywood tripe.
The plot is so involved that I will suffice to state that Spidey battles all three of the above named villains, and, naturally triumphs (although, technically, Venom seems to be not totally destroyed). The film also spins upon the Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst)-Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) romance, which takes a beating due to the arrival of Gwen Stacey (Bryce Dallas Howard) and the alien symbiote suit that makes Spider-Man’s suit black, for a time, before leeching onto the body of Peter’s photographic rival, Eddie Brock (Topher Grace), and turning him into Venom, the most popular Marvel Comics superhero villain of all time; although, again, technically, the villain is never specifically called that in the film’s diegesis.
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