After two successful entries, there was never any doubt of a third entry in Raimi’s Spider-Man series, and 2007 saw Maguire don the costume once again. With new villains, new challenges and a new girl on the scene (albeit one instantly recognisable to fans of the comics), everything seemed set for Spidey to rule the world once more – what could possibly go wrong?

As Spider-Man’s fame and recognition peak, troubles begin at home for Peter and MJ. Meanwhile, Harry plots his revenge against his old friend for the murder of his father, a new photographer at the Bugle is snapping at Peter’s heels and fresh information emerges about the death of Uncle Ben which will change the lives of those who loved him.

Conventional wisdom dictates that the main issue with Spider-Man 3 is that there is simply too much going on. There are three separate villains, many different storylines, and only so much time in which to pack them all. The industry scuttlebutt has it that Raimi had wanted to leave Venom out of the film, feeling that the villain deserved his own instalment, but the studio pushed for his inclusion here. All of that may be true, but on a re-watch, the main issue with Spider-Man 3 became painfully clear to me – one that reaches right to the heart of the franchise and the character it set out to portray.

That issue is responsibility. Responsibility is the keystone of the Spider-Man mythos. Uncle Ben’s oft-quoted words are perhaps one of the most – if not the most – iconic lines in comic book history. With great power, comes great responsibility. It’s a message that these movies repeatedly refer us back to verbally – the problem is that they don’t ever actually follow through on them properly, and never less so than here.

Let’s begin with the Sandman plot. Flint Marko is a guy who escapes from jail somehow (the film never sees fit to elaborate) and is chased by some cops into a field which happens to be where there is a particle physics lab testing ground. Marko stumbles into the apparatus just as the scientists happen to be switching it on and ends up being rendered into a sand person because the sand in the machine that they are aiming their… weird beam thing at melds with his DNA in some CGI that really is starting to show its age.

These movies have never been all that detailed when it comes to the science behind the villains and their transformations, but this takes the biscuit. Why the scientists aren’t more bothered by the fluctuations in their machine, what they are actually experimenting with/trying to do, how it works are never even cursorily examined. It’s a beam, it does a thing, he becomes Sandman. The script simply waves its hand and expects you to go with it.

Prior to this scene we’ve seen Flint drop in on his estranged wife and sick daughter (no idea what she’s sick with, the script doesn’t deem it important – Raimi’s treatment of female characters continues to be poor, and there’s nothing new to say about it here) in an attempt to establish him as a sympathetic character – that’s important, but literally not until the end of this nearly two-and-a-half hour long movie.

Because the torturous plot has another twist. Turns out that Flint is actually the guy who killed Uncle Ben, not Dennis Carradine (last seen being killed (accidentally-ish) by Peter in the first film. Why the film lumbers itself with this cumbersome connection between Peter and Sandman is never really fully clear. It muddies the actions of Peter from the first film onwards, meaning that he murdered an innocent man (about which he has never really shown any remorse, nor does so here save for one verbal aside about ‘having done terrible things’). Worse still, it feels so artificial, in a series which – despite doing many things wrong – always managed to keep any connections between Peter and his enemies feeling organic rather than forced. At any rate, here we see several things which conflict with the responsibility narrative. First, upon finding that he killed the wrong man, Peter shows absolutely no remorse or guilt, just anger that he didn’t get the right guy. Second, when he pursues and attempts to kill Marko (and indeed thinks that he has) he does so under the influence of the Venom parasite, meaning that it’s not really him doing it. Third, when we get to the final big reveal from Marko about what really happened that fateful night, it turns out that he was holding a gun and someone jogged him and it went off accidentally, mortally wounding Ben. Peter then forgives him and he fades away. No responsibility, no accounting for the behaviour of a man who – however noble his intentions were for the money he stole (sick daughter) – was waving a loaded gun with the safety off in an old man’s face with predictable results. No harm, no foul, go about your business Mr Marko, you’re alright really.

Then there’s Venom. After Peter finally rejects the parasite and re-dons the red and blue, Eddie Brock takes the mantle of everyone’s favourite antihero. The film seems awfully confused about Brock – he comes across as a sleazy character from the first frame he’s in, but he does seem to genuinely be bewitched by Gwen Stacy, and to desperately want a job. When dark Spidey breaks his camera, it’s a dick move, and when emo-Peter shows up to humiliate Eddie and lose him his job, it’s also a dick move. But then again, Eddie did fake a photograph of Spidey stealing something in order to get the job. Then Eddie goes to church to confess and asks God to kill Peter Parker for him. My theology is a little rusty, but I’m pretty certain that’s not how Catholicism works. At any rate, Brock is another character for whom no responsibility is ever really assigned. It’s Peter’s fault he lost his job (or so the movie frames it, despite his only having pointed out the truth of Eddie’s fraud), it’s the suit which turns him bad because he’s down on his luck, lost ‘his girl’ (despite Gwen explicitly telling us they went for one cup of coffee once) and is at his lowest ebb. Fortunately, he’s barely in the movie, which is perhaps the best thing that can be said.

And then there’s Harry. Harry’s part in this abstaining from responsibility buffet is many-layered. First up, he tries to kill Peter, and in the middle of their fight he gets a hefty whack on the head and nearly dies. When he awakens, he’s got that most comic-book of injuries – memory loss. How convenient! Now he can’t remember anything other than a vague idea that his Dad died. His hatred of Spidey/Peter is gone, and Peter who is supposed to live his life by the words of Uncle Ben on responsibility smiles, sighs with relief and just allows it to be, buddying up with Harry again as if nothing had ever happened.

When Harry finally remembers again, it’s after MJ kisses him and then rushes off in regret. Upon which he hatches a nefarious plan, kidnaps MJ and forces her to go and break up with Peter, telling him she’s ‘seeing someone else’, then meets with Peter to ostensibly console him, only to tell him that he himself is the other man. There’s definitely at the very least menaces being made towards MJ here in relation to this plan, yet later on when Harry suddenly turns good again, both Peter and MJ just welcome him back into the fold as if nothing ever happened. Sure, he then ends up sacrificing himself to save Peter, but even as he’s laying there dying with MJ hovering over him, you’d think maybe he might say something along the lines of, you know, ‘sorry I violently burst into your apartment and coerced you into breaking up with the love of your life for kicks’ but no, he just dies, a noble smile on his half-scarred face, at peace because facing what one has done is for other characters in better movies.

On a side note, Harry’s turning to the light side again happens after the butler who claims to love him like he loved his father finally bothers to tell him that his father killed himself (no way he could possibly know that but again, logic and evidence are not strongly in evidence in the plotting of this movie) which you would think was maybe something he could have said at any point up to now, but eh, who cares, look at that explosion!

Ultimately then, in keeping with the first two entries, we have villains who are all portrayed as victims of their circumstance by a script which often feels genuinely like it cannot make up its mind whether they are good guys down on their luck or genuinely evil. Hilariously, Venom tracks down Sandman and says, ‘We both want Spider-Man dead, let’s work together’ and Sandman goes along with it, despite having claimed several times by that point that he’s ‘not a bad man’. Also, the script handwaves again, having Brock know all about Marko and his daughter because of some sort of research that he’s supposedly done, though where and when remain unclear. Then when Venom is dead, Marko just sort of immediately calms down, has a nice chat with Peter, explains the unfortunate-circumstance-that-definitely-wasn’t-his-fault which led to Uncle Ben’s death, receives his pardon and is gone.

But what really grinds is that the habit of the franchise to apply this sort of oddly exculpatory logic to its villains here also bleeds over into our hero. Leaving aside the early self-involvement angle which causes tension between him and MJ where he’s so taken with his fame he can’t even have a normal conversation and comfort her when she’s upset, Peter’s main bad actions of the film are all explained away by the Venom parasite. He takes Gwen to the bar where he knows MJ works just to taunt her, he humiliates Brock to get him fired (although as we’ve covered, the movie’s morality seems weirdly confused on that one), he tries to kill Sandman, thinks he has and goes to brag to Aunt May about it, and he shouts at his landlord (again, an odd one), actually ends up starting a fight which sees him physically strike MJ and generally acts like an asshole. But it’s all ok because it’s being done by the suit. What’s really disappointing here is that lost in the crash bang wallop of the constant, relentless action pieces here are the words of Doctor Connors at one point to Peter on the parasite – it amplifies certain characteristics within the host. The message there is clear – Peter is, deep down, the sort of guy who wants to hurt people, punish and humiliate them, and all that’s stopped him over the years has been the steady guidance of his Aunt and Uncle and his guilt at his part in the death of the latter. That would be a message worth addressing, but instead, the moment the parasite leaves him, he’s back to being good ol’ Pete and everyone just shrugs and carries on.

There’s actually one scene in particular which sums this whole conundrum up nicely – Peter tearfully confesses to May that he has ‘hurt’ MJ (without being specific) and, rather than ask how or tell him to man up and face what he did (as one suspects Ben would have done) she says, ‘You must do the hardest thing’. There’s a pause, and you think ‘I know the next word will be ‘apologise’, before she continues – ‘Forgive yourself’. There’s this whole issue write large in one sentence – Hero does bad thing, mentor figure tells him he must forgive himself for it, responsibility be damned.

But of course, this weird tension of logic between the source material’s central message and what we see on screen is only part of what’s wrong here, albeit a major one. The plotting here is odd to say the least – there’s a sense that the script is very much thrown together, that perhaps there are whole scenes on a cutting room floor somewhere which might make elements of this make more sense. Marko’s plot in particular feels oddly truncated, with him feeling like the basis of a much deeper character which got rushed to screen before anything more than a basic outline was given. We know that he thinks he’s a good man because that what he tells us – the action in the movie does nothing (beyond noting that he cares about his sick daughter) to show us this or convince us in any way. This kind of ‘telling not showing’ is on display a lot here, with characters monologuing out loud about how they feel, or what certain sensations feel like to them, rather than the film having them show us instead. There’s no real coherent motivation to any villain except Harry, who at least has an organic connection to Peter and a reason (albeit misguided) to want to hurt/kill him. As much as Venom is the villain who is publicly touted as having been ‘tacked on’ here, Sandman feels just as superfluous. It feels like what Raimi set out to make was a concluding chapter to the trilogy which might see Harry and Peter confront one another in a showdown that mirrored a lot of the first film, brought the narrative full circle and explained some of the investment those first two movies made in a Harry Osborn who often felt utterly unnecessary. Maybe it would have been a legendary conclusion for the ages, but it was sent astray the moment someone said ‘let’s get more bad guys in there’.

The problem is not so much that there are too many villains, but that there is not enough narrative energy to sustain them. Sandman literally disappears for the entire second act of the film, Brock is no more than a background irritant until the last twenty minutes or so when he becomes Venom, and Harry doesn’t get an awful lot to do until that final scene either. The film attempts to make Spidey the villain of his own piece, which would be a difficult sell for most heroes and is almost impossible here. There are bare bones foundations for at least three, possibly four films here, but they’re awkwardly packed into a single entry and it suffers because of it.

If you needed more evidence for that ‘Mirror of the first movie’ theory, look no further than at how much gets recycled – Gwen’s repetition of the famous kiss from the alleyway, Harry’s death at the spikes of his own hoverboard, the revisiting/rehashing of Uncle Ben’s final moments. It’s another attempt at the sort of ‘rhyming poetry’ filmmaking so beloved of George Lucas, but it fails under the weight of a plot simultaneously too heavy and stodgy and too ephemerally light.

That’s not all to say that there isn’t enjoyment to be had here, though it comes in small measure. J K Simmons seems to have somewhat revived his character for this third instalment, with some nice nuance added back to the character and some genuinely funny exchanges with his secretary and others. Long-time Raimi-collaborator Bruce Campbell returns for his third and easily best Spidey Cameo as a French waiter with impeccable humour, and basically entirely steals the scene for which he’s a backdrop, and it’s genuinely nice to see Harry and Peter team up at the end, in spite of how contrived the journey feels to have got them there.

On the other hand, oddly of the three movies this one has easily the most poorly aging CGI, with the Sandman scenes in particular not holding up well at all. It also has the most blatant Stan Lee cameo – in the first two movies you really can blink and miss Stan’s little background parts but here he’s front and centre, reeling off the ‘One man really can make a difference’ mantra in a scene so on the nose I’m amazed he didn’t finish with ‘Excelsior’ and then wink at the camera. That one cameo alone might well be a metaphor for the entire movie, as it blunders through references which fans will get without really doing much with them – we meet Gwen but get to know nothing about her, we meet her father too for a couple of brief appearances – and some which contradict the films which came before (Eddie Brock is namechecked as a photographer at the Bugle in the first movie, yet presented here as a brand new character as if that mention had never happened). Combined with the odd absence of any responsibility happening anywhere in a property whose central character’s mantra is literally about responsibility, it just adds up to a film that feels as if it were made by someone who copied the answers from someone else without really understanding what any of them meant.

A poor end then, to a trilogy which hasn’t aged all that well in hindsight. Perhaps it’s just that we have a much more abundant supply of big budget comic book movies these days, perhaps simply the march of time and its unkindness to all things. I recall my main feeling when seeing Spider-Man 3 at the cinema being one of vague disappointment. Now, watching it with fresh eyes, that disappointment is sharper, more focused on the things which the film gets so very wrong at every turn. There are occasional laughs, but there’s no heart or soul to this. Worse, there’s indications that there could have been one. I don’t know about Uncle Ben, but I for one am not angry with Maguire’s Peter Parker, just terribly let down.