Spider-Man 3: Peter Parker Puts On the Black Suit

The black suit is the thing I’ve wanted on screen since the first one of these came out, and Spider-Man 3 finally gives it to me. It’s one of the great comic book images, the same silhouette, the white spider, all the colour drained out of a character who’s defined by being red and blue. On the page it works because it turns up looking like an upgrade and turns out to be something feeding on him. The film gets the look exactly right. And then it does almost nothing worth doing with it, which is a sentence I didn’t expect to be writing about the third one after how much I liked the second.

The suit is great and the film squanders it

I want to be fair here, because the parts of this that work are the parts I cared most about going in. Seeing the black costume properly realised is a real pleasure. It’s slicker, it moves differently, the fights carry more weight, and it’s shot like a threat rather than a costume change. When the film finally turns and shows you that the thing’s been amplifying the worst of him, that it was never a gift, that landed for me and landed hard. There’s something genuinely sad about watching a character you’ve liked for years get gradually worse and enjoy the process, and that’s the story the black suit exists to tell, and for about twenty minutes this film tells it properly.

Then there’s the jazz club, and I don’t know what else to say about it. The fringe, the eyeliner, the strut down the pavement, the finger guns at women in the street, and then a full musical number in a nightclub while Mary Jane watches from a few feet away. It’s pathetic. It’s the single worst decision anybody made in this trilogy and I couldn’t get past it. Whatever the intention was, the effect is that the film stops taking its own premise seriously at the exact moment the premise most needed it, because you can’t spend an hour building a corruption story and then play the corruption as a man doing a funny walk. It kills the tension stone dead, and in some ways it killed the film for me, everything after it I watched from a bit of a distance.

These films have always had a broad, silly streak and it’s worked before, the Bruce Campbell scenes here are fine and I laughed at them. So it’s not that I wanted the whole thing grim. But there’s a difference between a comic touch at the edges and letting the joke eat the central idea, and this is firmly the second thing, right in the middle of the one story I’d been waiting three films to see.

Three villains, and none of them get a film

The clutter is the core problem. Sandman, Venom and Harry are all here, plus the black suit arc, plus a proposal plot, plus Mary Jane’s career collapsing, plus Gwen Stacy turning up to make her jealous, and every one of those needs room and none of them gets any. I don’t mind a film squeezing a huge story into one sitting, I really enjoyed Dune cramming all of book one in and coming out the other side in one piece. But that was one story told fast. This is five stories fighting over the same two hours and a bit.

Venom suffers worst, and he’s the other thing I actually wanted. Topher Grace is a fine actor and completely wrong for this. Eddie Brock is supposed to be physically enormous, a man who’s a threat before the symbiote gets anywhere near him, and the reason the character works at all is that he’s Peter’s opposite in size, temperament and grievance. What turns up instead is a smaller, whinier rival photographer who’s there to be irritating for an hour and then wears a costume for the last fifteen minutes. Brock is introduced, wronged, bonded, transformed and killed inside about a third of a film. It’s the version of Venom you’d get if somebody described the character over the phone.

Sandman, by contrast, is the best thing in the picture. Thomas Haden Church barely speaks and is enormously affecting anyway, and the sequence where the sand tries to pull itself into a shape and keeps collapsing is the finest visual effect I’ve seen in a cinema this decade. He’s got a dying daughter, a robbery that went wrong, and an actual reason to be doing any of this. Give that man his own film and it’d be the best of the three. Instead he shares the running time with two other plots and gets written out with a shrug and a forgiveness scene the film hasn’t earned.

Everybody else pays for the crowding

Mary Jane got squeezed out too. The second film gave her a career going well while Peter’s life fell apart, a real decision to make, and the best closing shot of the trilogy. Here her singing career collapses in a single scene, and after that she mostly exists to be disappointed in Peter, to be made jealous, and eventually to be dangled over a construction site. Kirsten Dunst has been good in both of the others and there’s nothing here for her. Gwen Stacy fares worse still, a big character with a big history in the comics, used as a device to annoy the female lead and then dropped, which honestly annoyed me more than it annoyed Mary Jane.

Harry’s the one who nearly survives the crowding, and the way the film gets him there is the laziest thing in it. He attacks Peter in the first act, takes a knock to the head, and loses his memory of the entire grudge, which is a soap opera trick dropped into a story that had been building this properly for five years. Then the butler volunteers a piece of information he could have offered two films ago and everything resolves at once. Franco’s good throughout and the death lands anyway, which tells you how much groundwork the earlier films had already done for him. It deserved better than amnesia and a servant with excellent timing.

The retcon, and what’s left

Making Flint Marko the man who actually killed Uncle Ben is where I stopped being able to defend the script at all. The wrestling promoter, the robber who ran past, the car at the kerb, that’s the foundation of two films and roughly forty years of comics. Rewriting it so the real killer was somebody else, and it was an accident, and Peter’s been wrong the entire time, doesn’t deepen anything. It makes the previous two films slightly less true in order to hand this one a third act, and if the emotional stakes have to be manufactured by going back and editing the past, I’m not sure they were ever there in the first place.

There’s still plenty that works, and more of it than the reaction I’ve seen would suggest. J.K. Simmons remains perfect and has now been in all three of these without a single wasted line, every Bugle scene perks the film straight back up. But good bits aren’t the same thing as an iconic film, and the first two were iconic. The wrestling ring. The train. The upside-down kiss in the rain. This one has nothing that’ll sit next to those, and I don’t think it’s close, which is a strange thing to be saying about a film with that suit in it.

Three out of five, and comfortably the worst of the three. That number is doing a lot of work in both directions: it’s too high for the jazz club and too low for the forty minutes of Sandman material buried underneath everything else. There were two excellent Spider-Man films before this one and this isn’t a third. What bothers me most isn’t that it’s bad, because it isn’t quite bad. It’s that it’s crowded, and crowded is a decision somebody made on purpose.