The black suit is the thing I have wanted on screen since the first one of these came out. It is one of the great comic book images: the same silhouette, the white spider, all the colour drained out of a character 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. Then it does almost nothing worth doing with it.
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 Raimi shoots it like a threat rather than a costume change. When the film finally turns and shows you that the thing has been amplifying the worst of him, that it was never a gift, that landed for me and landed hard. There is something genuinely sad about watching a character you have liked for years get gradually worse and enjoy the process. That is 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 is pathetic. It is the single worst decision anybody made in this trilogy and I could not 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. You cannot 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 distance.
Raimi has a broad, silly streak and it has worked for him before. The Bruce Campbell scenes here are fine. But there is a difference between a comic touch at the edges and letting the joke eat the central idea, and this is firmly the second thing.
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. Every one of those needs room. None of them gets any.
Venom suffers worst, and it’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 is a threat before the symbiote gets anywhere near him, and the reason the character works at all is that he is Peter’s opposite in size, temperament and grievance. What turns up instead is a smaller, whinier rival photographer who exists 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 would 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 assemble itself into a shape and keeps collapsing is the finest visual effect I have seen in a cinema this decade. He has 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 would 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 has not 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 tied up on a construction site. Kirsten Dunst has been good in both of the others and there is nothing here for her. Gwen Stacy fares worse still: a significant character with a significant history in the comics, deployed as a device to annoy the female lead and then dropped.
Harry is 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 device 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 is good throughout and the death lands anyway, which tells you how much groundwork the earlier films had already done for him. It deserved a better delivery 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 car park, the wrestling promoter, the robber who ran past: that is 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 has been wrong the entire time, does not deepen anything. It makes the previous two films slightly less true in order to hand this one a third act. If the emotional stakes have to be manufactured by going back and editing the past, the stakes were never there.
There is still plenty that works. J.K. Simmons remains perfect and has now been in all three of these without a single wasted line. James Franco finally gets to play Harry’s whole arc, and the death scene works considerably better than the film around it deserves. The Sandman effects. The black suit design itself. Good bits, and more of them than the reaction I’ve seen would suggest. But good bits are not the same thing as an iconic film, and the first two were iconic. The wrestling ring and the car park. The train. This one has nothing that will sit next to those, and I don’t think it’s close.
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. Raimi has made two excellent Spider-Man films and this is not one of them. 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.