Remember in Spider-Man 2, when Spider-Man has to stop the runaway train during his fight with Doctor Octopus, and even though you know he’s going to be able to pull it off, you’re thinking “how the hell is he going to pull it off?” and you’re on the edge of your seat and Spidey’s strain and panic is palpable, but he does it and he saves the day and it’s cool. And his mask is destroyed and all the New Yorkers he saved see his face, but they all vow to keep his secret safe and it’s totally cheesy and totally awesome and totally comic-book? Remember that? Well, I’m convinced that all the people involved in making that scene come to life were sacked and replaced with robots between the making of Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man 3.
The first two Spider-Man movies may have been big-budget, crowd-pleasing Hollywood blockbusters, but they had heart and an affection for the source material, and you felt that the people involved really wanted to make some cool movies and bring you along for the ride. I didn’t love them, as they say, but I did like them. Spider-Man 3 is a big-budget, crowd-pleasing Hollywood blockbuster with dollar-signs in its eyes. Nobody wanted to make this movie, it’s just product. Even the special effects are strictly perfunctory: I couldn’t stop wondering how they could look simultaneously so expensive and so bad. There’s a scene near the beginning with Spider-Man fighting in the world’s longest, least-convincing CGI alley that looks so fake I was honestly expecting the camera to pull back and reveal it was actually Tobey Maguire on his Xbox. Actually, I think that watching Tobey play videogames would be preferable to his abysmal performance here. When he has to play “bad”, it’s just embarrassing. Like, Star Wars Kid embarrassing. I’m not even kidding:
The only bright spot in the movie is a subplot involving Thomas Hayden Church’s Sandman, which, for a few all-too-brief moments, has the pathos of the first two films. It’s like he saw everybody else phoning it in and decided “fuck these losers, I’m actually going to work for my undoubtedly obscene paycheck”.
And so, in conclusion, I give Spider-Man 3 four cringe-inducing Tobey Maguire acting montages out of ten.