Cast Tobey Maguire
Kirsten Dunst
James Franco
Thomas Haden Church
Topher Grace
Director
Sam Raimi
Screenwriters
Sam Raimi
Ivan Raimi
Alvin Sargent
Running Time
139 minutes
Peter Parker (Maguire) is happily in love with Mary Jane Watson (Dunst). But he comes under attack from escaped convict Flint Marko, AKA the Sandman (Church); former best friend Harry Osborn (Franco), now the deranged New Goblin; and at the Daily Bugle, where ace snapper Eddie Brock (Topher Grace) threatens his job. Worst of all is a black symbiotic goo that affixes itself to Peter’s spider-suit and changes his personality. Can Spidey survive the venom within?
I enjoyed Spider-man 3, although not as much as the first two films.
I suspect that a lot of footage had to be cut out to get down to the 2 hour 19 minute running time. A lot of detail about the Sandman character, including his family, were missing in comparison to how much there was of the villains in the first two movies. There were a lot of scenes that seemed very abbreviated and there were lurches in tone between others. Hopefully there will be a DVD version released which will contain a longer cut of the movie that will solve most of these problems. I don't believe it will solve all of them, if we get that version at all, because I think it was a fundamental mistake to introduce two villains [The film-makers somewhat shot themselves in the foot by killing off the villains in the first two films, if they wanted multiple villains they could have brought back those two].
The inclusion of Gwen Stacey for a few scenes seems unnecessary when they could have just used and built up the existing Betty Brant character, it just seems an easter egg for Comic book readers without any other point to it. Also I find it strange that they seem to forget what happened in the previous films, surely John Jameson as an astronaut was the avenue to have Venom brought to earth. The repetition of Mary Jane as hostage I didn't like, it was enough after the first two and seemed a little lazy, surely she should now only play a part of his life when Peter Parker and changing Ben Parker's killer, to retcon after just 3 films!
The film seems to have done well financially as did the missed opportunity that was X-Men 3 [The Dark Phoenix saga as a B-story!] which is good as they are the two biggest pillars holding up the Superhero movie genre. I don't think it's as simple as them not making money or dissapointing the core audience to have it fail which it one day inevitably will but I hope it will last for a few years yet and we'll get some more great films from it.
