30 Day Movie Challenge - #18 - What was a film that disappointed you the most?
Day 18 - What was a film that disappointed you the most?
Answer: Spider-man 3 (2007)
The reason why Spider-man 3 is disappointing is pretty obvious. It's a Spider-man movie. We are looking at the 3rd movie in the franchise. There was the promise of introducing his arch nemesis Venom here. What we got was a complete mess of a film. It's a mixed bag. Scenes involving Peter Parker under the influence of the symbiote was going fine until we got to the dancing scenes. Like... why? Then there's the head scratcher of the casting choice to play Eddie Brock. They picked Topher Grace. Really? Topher Grace? Yeah. I totally think of Eric Foreman when it comes to who should play Eddie Brock. My thought is they wanted someone who could be the opposite of Tobey Maguire and I guess Topher Grace was kind of a similar looking guy around 2007. However, that's kind of the worst choice for someone to play Venom. He wasn't even intimidating in the slightest. That's before we even start getting to Sandman and the unnecessary addition of another Green Goblin to really complicate the plot.
Let's just hit the quick bullet points of the plot. Peter Parker ends up getting attached to the symbiote and that gives him the black version of his spider suit. The symbiote starts making Peter act differently. He becomes more cocky and aggressive. Mary Jane ends up breaking up with him and Peter ends up dating Gwen Stacy for a bit. Harry Osborn wants to get revenge on Peter for the death of his father from the first movie. We get introduced into the character of Sandman and we learn that he has some connection to the death of Uncle Ben. We meet Eddie Brock who is supposed to be Peter's rival at the Daily Bugle. After Peter exposes some of Eddie's photos of Spider-man being a criminal, a coincidence of being in the same place at the same time leads to Peter removing the symbiote from himself and it getting itself attached to Eddie Brock. Venom is born. Confrontations are inevitable.
Venom is one of my favorite comic book characters and I was kind of excited to see him get brought to the big screen finally. That was kind of ruined by this film. Topher Grace was miscast. That pretty much sums it up. He was a bad choice to play Eddie Brock. The design of the character to look more like Spider-Man didn't help much either. Yeah. His look is influenced by Spider-man because the symbiote was attached to Peter first, but that doesn't mean that Venom doesn't have his own distinct appearance. I wasn't too bothered by Sandman. I felt like his parts of the movie were some of the better bits. Emo Peter Parker was handled poorly. We really didn't need the addition of Harry Osborn trying to get revenge either. Too much is going on in this one film and it ends up bogging down the plot entirely. I kind of would have liked to see one of the villains cut from the film. Probably Venom since he wasn't done justice. I probably would've like to see Harry as Green Goblin cut too because we don't need to see that again. I don't know. The film was a huge mess and it was one of the many films that disappointed me over the years.
