Peter and MJ are happily together, MJ is performing on Broadway and all is right with the world. Until a meteorite brings a mysterious black symbiote to Earth, Harry tries to kill Peter and develops partial amnesia in the fight, and escaped convict Flint Marko stumbles into a particle accelerator and is turned into sand.

This all happens in, at most, the first 45 minutes of the movie.

At the time of release, this was a disaster. Sam  Raimi had delivered two excellent, well received movies which of course meant it was time to meddle with the formula and demand he add in Venom. The pre-Tom Hardy Venom is dealt with so cursorily he’s barely in the movie, and Topher Grace’s always fun peppy asshole energy is thrown away on a half dozen lines as Eddie Brock. Venom 3 is made almost entirely of faults, but even that is a far better take on the character than the grumpy, offhand way he’s dealt with here.

He’s not alone. With so little room to work, the rivalry between Eddie and Peter is sprinted through and Grace, Bryce Dallas Howard and James Cromwell are laughably under used as Brock, Gwen Stacy and her father Captain George Stacy. Cromwell is in maybe three scenes and Howard’s single job is to look good, scream and apologise to MJ for Peter being a laughably egregious asshole at one point. Thomas Haden Church fares a lot better as Flint Marko, and brings actual poignancy to the character, even with being shoehorned into yet another overhaul of Uncle Ben’s death.

The core cast fare a little better. After three movies Dunst is finally given something meaty to work with as MJ, but even then her plot is largely resolved off screen as she’s forced to dump Peter to keep him alive. Franco, bad to genuinely awful in the previous two movies, is also surprisingly quite good here. Harry seethes with menace, and the opening chase and later knockdown drag out fist fight between Pete and Goblinised Harry snaps with brutality. There’s a real sense of danger as these two men give in to every terrible instinct and hurt each other for fun and if the movie had played with this darkness a little more it would be much more fondly remembered.

Weirdly, the bit characters get some surprising dramatic chops here. John Paxton as Bernard Houseman, Harry’s butler, carries the movie’s most ridiculous plotline on his back in the single dialogue scene he has in the entire franchise. Elya Baskin too, struggling under the risible stereotyping of landlord Mr Ditkovitch has some real, sweet material here.

At the time, Maguire got a lot of flak for playing Dark Pete as a truly enormous dork but as time’s gone on the performance has been a little vindicated. It’s still ridiculous, but with nineteen years of incel culture survived, there’s much less charm and much more threat to super confident Peter Parker. This isn’t a good man, and worse, he thinks he is, and again that most interesting idea gets a polaroid snapped of it as the movie sprints past to another rushed, weirdly cursory scene.

Verdict: Spider-Man 3 isn’t the disaster it once seemed to be but it is still by far the worst of the original trilogy. Stuffed to the gills with characters, none of whom have any room, it’s an operatic, overblown and at times annoying experience that just about redeems itself. The ending is unexpectedly mature and the emotion, heightened as it is, still plays well. The first of several mis-swings but still, just, worth your time. 7/10

Alasdair Stuart