Dear Mr. Raimi,
I've been a fan of Spider-Man as long as I can remember. I loved the comics as a kid. I watched the live action TV show in the seventies. I used to watch Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends on Saturday mornings in the 80s. In college I collected Spider-Man comics obsessively.
I've also been a big fan of yours. Darkman was a favorite of mine before anyone had heard of you, Francis McDormand or Liam Neeson. Army of Darkness is one of my all time favorites, as is Spider-Man 2. When Spider-Man 2 ended, I was tempted to sit there in the theater and wait for the next showing.
So believe me when I tell you this: Spider-Man 3 sucked.
Let's start with the black costume/Venom storyline. I'm not a comics purist; I couldn't care less that you didn't pursue the Beyonder planet/Secret Wars storyline. But your explanation for the black suit is that it fell from space? Just like that, 50 feet away from Peter Parker's scooter? WTF?
Then there's Kirsten Dunst, who's been living on borrowed time since Interview with a Vampire, as far as I'm concerned. In the comics, Mary Jane was a model. How hard is it to find someone in Hollywood who looks and acts like a model? She was tolerable as a love interest in the first two movies, but now you've gone and elevated her almost to a leading role. I mean, she plays an actress who gets fired for being a lousy performer, and she can't even pull that off. Hello? I have two words for all casting directors: Rachel McAdams. Any time you're tempted to cast Kirsten Dunst, Kate Bosworth, Katie Holmes or pretty much any other perky young thing, please cast Rachel McAdams instead. She's cute as a button, and can act the crap out of any of those other chicks.Speaking of minor characters and subplots nobody gives a shit about, could you possibly include any more of them? It's like I was watching my entire adolescence of comic reading flash before my eyes: Sandman, Venom, J. Jonah Jameson, Robbie Robertson, Gwen Stacy, Captain Stacy, Green Goblin, Blue Goblin/Hobgoblin, Aunt May, Uncle Ben.... What, was Flash Thompson busy? And with the number of times that a character got "killed off" only to reappear later, I was half-expecting Gwen Stacy's clone to show up. I was going to joke that The Lizard was the only villain who hadn't checked in yet, but then I realized that The Lizard was in the movie: his alter ego is Peter Parker's one-armed physics (!) professor, Doc Connors.
And do I really need to give you a refresher on Spider-Man's powers? First of all, Spidey can't be blindsided by a guy on a flying skateboard. He can sense danger. It's called "Spider-sense," in case you've forgotten. And tell me, which of Spidey's powers allow his head to be used to shatter brick walls without him getting so much as a headache?
Any superhero movie is going to have its share of unlikely coincidences, but Spider-Man 3 stacks them up like some kind of super-powered version of Six Degrees of Separation. I mean, let me get this straight: In a city of eight million people, Peter Parker's rival at the Daily Bugle, Eddie Brock, also happens to be dating Gwen Stacy, a girl in Peter's physics class, who is the daughter of the police captain who is overseeing the investigation of the murder of Peter's uncle. Peter's uncle turns out to have been murdered by an escaped convict named Flint Marco, who has been transformed into Sandman, a supervillain who shows up during a ceremony in which Gwen thanks Spider-Man for saving her life during a freak crane accident. After Peter's physics professor, Dr. Connors (you remember, from his class with Gwen) advises him about the dangers of the alien suit, Peter fights off the suit only to have it fall on Eddie Brock (no, literally, it falls on him), who happens to be standing below. Brock is turned into Spider-Man's nemesis Venom, who then teams up with Sandman to kill Spidey. I live in a town of 12,000 people, and I sometimes go three months without running into that many people I know.
Let's see, what else. I'm trying to keep the whole "Peter Parker turns into the evil version of John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever" storyline from settling in my long-term memory, so I'm going to skip over that completely.
There's Mary Jane's inexplicable break-up with Petey, prompted by some vague threats from Harry Osbourne, who is still inexplicably mad at Peter for killing his jerkwad father. There are Harry's three abrupt personality switches -- a bit much to ask of James Franco, who can on a good day manage only good-natured confusion. The last of these abrupt changes occurs when yet another minor character, Harry's butler Bernard, explains to Harry that oh, by the way, Spider-Man didn't actually kill your father. Hey, Bernard, you could have saved us all a lot of trouble if you had mentioned that like TWO HOURS AGO.The Sandman storyline bothers me on about six different levels, setting aside his ridiculous origin ("We put a fence around that particle accelerator, it's not our fault someone fell in!"). First of all, making Flint Marco the real killer of Uncle Ben is lazy, cheap and unnecessary. And then there's Sandman's apology to Peter at the end. "Gee, Pete, I'm real sorry about turning into a giant sand-monster and trying to crush you with my gigantic sand-fists, but I really needed some money because my daughter is sick or something. Come to think of it, nothing I've done in this movie makes much sense. I'll just anticlimactically blow away in the wind now." And if you're going to try to make Sandman a relatable character by giving him a sick daughter, maybe you could actually follow through on that storyline. What happened to the daughter? You could at least have summarily killed her off like you did with all the other characters we were sick of after 2 and a half hours.
The plot makes virtually no sense, which makes it even more puzzling that you included so many dull expository scenes. I love Aunt May as much as anyone, but holy crap do I really need to hear about how Uncle Ben proposed to her while they were in their bathing suits? And then, when you actually needed a transition to explain how Peter and Mary Jane managed to overcome their problems and get back together, you fudge it with a lame romantic scene. It wouldn't have taken that much, you know. Something along the lines of "Hey, I know you lied to me about being involved with Harry because he was inspired by the ghost of his mad scientist father to threaten to kill me, and I only punched and humiliated you and acted like a total ass-hat because I was possessed by an evil alien costume from outer space, so let's say we're even and make sweet spider-love. Will you marry me with this ring that my Aunt May gave me, assuming I can get the image of her in her bathing suit out of my head by staying really drunk for the next several days?"
Having seen Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2, not to mention the rest of your work, I can't even fathom how you were capable of foisting such a shit-bomb on us. Dude, The Quick and the Dead was better than this, and that had Sharon Stone in it. The best part of this movie was Bruce Campbell's cameo. I'd rather watch a movie featuring his French waiter character than sit through something like this again. I'll admit it's not the worst superhero movie I've seen, but if it weren't for the sheer likability of most of your cast, you'd be a couple of spider-nipples away from Batman and Robin territory here. Trust me, I don't bring up the-movie-that-must-not-be-named lightly. Don't make me do it again.
I don't know what's happened to you. I can only assume that a big black slimy ball of money fell from the heavens and is using your movie-making abilities for evil. I urge you to fight it off and redeem yourself with the next installment. Short of that, hand the reins to Bryan Singer, Christopher Nolan or even -- shudder -- Brett Ratner. The future of our children depends on it.
Humor-blogs.com inexplicably fell to earth from outer space INTO a particle accelerator.
Labels: Exemplary Police Work, Movies, Reviews, Superheroes
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