Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3 is misunderstood
https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/foma3m/sam_raimis_spiderman_3_is_misunderstood_please/
Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3 is commonly credited for “ruining” Spider-Man’s first cinematic run. It is criticized for being tonally dissonant with an overpacked plot that doesn’t live up to the prior two installments. The emo-swinger scene is one of the most derided movie scenes on the internet, only appreciated in [ironic memes.] (https://i.redd.it/5fhhrcyfv4h21.jpg) Fans of the franchise are quick to blame these problems on executives tampering with Raimi’s vision for the character by forcing him to factor Venom into the plot, but I don’t think that is accurate. These “problems” are consistent directorial quirks and they would have been present whether or not Venom was in the movie. Raimi showed us this in his Evil Dead trilogy.share
The first Evil Dead was an attempt at a serious horror film. Most people don’t find it to be very scary, rather it is a cult film for its campy acting and over-the-top gore, but the intention is still clearly to be a scare fest. For Evil Dead II, Raimi kept some horror elements but otherwise went for a full-on slapstick comedy. The third film, Army of Darkness, represents a complete tonal shift into a Ray Harryhausen-inspired fantasy adventure comedy, more in line with Monty Python’s Holy Grail than Roman Polanski’s The Tenant. The plot mashes together the monsters of the two previous films, a medieval fantasy environment, mad max cars, three stooges gags, and an apocalyptic future ending (depending on the version you watch). Oh, and the hero, Ash, fights an evil version of himself in that one.
Like the first Evil Dead, the first Spider-Man attempts to be a serious genre depiction, and it succeeds at that more than Evil Dead did as Raimi had many years in between to mature as a filmmaker- but it was still criticized for the signature Raimi camp. If you watched it as a kid you will probably disagree, but adult viewers made fun of Dafoe’s overreacting and compared the costumed battles to episodes of Power Rangers. Spider-Man 2 is a more tonally consistent followup to its predecessor than Evil Dead II was- again, Raimi had twenty years to improve- but it is clearly far more comedic than Spider-Man 1. “Pizza Time,” “I’m back!,” “My back,” “Butter Fingers,” the overacting of extras, Jonah’s extreme anger, Bruce Campbell’s more prominent cameo, etc. A deleted scene with Jonah wearing the Spider-Man costume shows how far Raimi wanted to go with the humor. This was a major studio blockbuster film, so Raimi couldn’t completely forego the superhero aspect even if he wanted to- this and I’m not saying he did, just that his instincts are in comedy.
In Spider-Man 3, everything is escalated to cartoonish degrees, not just the emo stuff that everyone remembers. Compare the New Goblin aerial and armory battles to the apartment fight between Harry and Peter in Spider-Man 2; it’s ridiculous and excessive, and that’s what makes it fun. People think the movie was supposed to be taken seriously and the campiness gets in the way, but Army of Darkness reveals that it was always going to be a lighthearted, overstuffed, beautiful mess.
Spider-Man 3 ups the absurdity in all aspects- except for the Sandman plot- which is where the real tonal dissonance lies. The movie expects us to care about Sandman’s family, and the additional reveal that he killed Uncle Ben is bizarre. It feels like it was thought up late into the scriptwriting process to add relevancy to Sandman’s character. Venom isn’t the redundancy taking the audience out of the movie, Sandman is. Spider-Man 3 was meant to be a silly, fun action romp, not a tearjerker or an Infinity War-style trilogy-capping epic.