After her Broadway debut flops, Mary Jane glumly writes off her dreams and takes a job as a singing waitress at a jazz club.

Franco’s performance is delightfully strange- just watch that notorious diner scene again-but he also finds the turmoil of a man torn between his friends and his overbearing father, and brings Harry's arc to a fitting close.Īnd then there’s Mary Jane, who gets her own compellingly human-sized story. There’s a genuine emotional journey here. Cut the amnesia, and you’re left with the story that serves as the logical culmination of the Spider-Man trilogy, as the childhood friends clash over both the human and the superheroic conflicts that have built up since the original Spider-Man. Why let him off the hook by pinning the whole thing on an alien symbiote?īut let’s talk about what does work about the movie: the climax of the franchise-defining love triangle between Peter Parker, Mary Jane, and Harry Osborn. And that’s an interesting development in his character! Maguire’s Peter Parker is essentially defined by his sweetness and guilelessness, but the uncritical adoration of an entire city could turn even the gentlest person into a smarmy asshole. Long before he gets taken over by the Venom symbiote, which completes his transformation into a thoughtless douchebag, he’s ignoring Mary Jane and boasting about becoming 'something of an icon' in New York City. He’s starting to buy into his own glowing press clippings. As Spider-Man 3 begins, Peter is already a little too self-satisfied about his role as New York City’s beloved protector.

The most frustrating thing about the Venom story is that Peter’s arc would be more interesting without it. While Raimi had built up a Rubik’s cube of narratives to develop by Spider-Man 3, he had also developed a world with a density and a history that few standalone superhero franchises can rival. At the very least, I’ll take a compelling mess like Spider-Man 3 over a by-the-numbers retread like the Amazing Spider-Man franchise any day. (Honestly, that dancing-in-the-street sequence is a blast.) Much of the movie is good, and the parts that are bad are still interesting. But I still think Spider-Man 3 has been unfairly overlooked, and criticized for all the wrong reasons. It's pretty clearly the worst of the ones Raimi made. I’m not making the case that Spider-Man 3 is the best superhero movie of all time, or even that it’s the best Spider-Man movie. As hot takes go, this one is closer to lukewarm. I do like Spider-Man 3-and 10 years after its original release, I'm still happy to mount a defense of it. He looked down at the ground, sighed a heavy sigh, and said, 'Yeah. We started talking about Spider-Man, and I told him I liked Spider-Man 3. A couple of years ago, I was interviewing Sam Raimi for the launch of Ash vs. Here’s a true story I think about sometimes.

Spiderman 3 full movie watch