The Movie: Spiderman 3, directed by Sam Raimi
Recommendation: Spiderman and Spiderman 2
Reason: Spiderman and Spiderman 2, along with X-Men, ushered in a brief period in which comic book based movies didn't completely suck. X3 was deliberately bad, but Sam Raimi stayed on for the third Spiderman, unlike Brian Singer and X-Men. Therefore, logically, Spiderman 3 shouldn't have SUCKED.
Hollywood politics can occasionally make movies great. Alfred Hitchcock tricked studios into carving Psycho into the masterwork it was. Casts shift and shuffle frequently as directors and actors come into conflict, and sometimes for the better. Those same politics can sometimes make movies really really suck. Spiderman 3? Yeah. It REALLY REALLY SUCKED. Between Avi Arad jackhammering Venom into the script, Sam Raimi apparently completely forgetting about a little thing we like to call 'pacing' and Kirsten Dunst apparently earning her paycheck by the minute, there was too much of everything but a good Spiderman story.
There were good things. The visual effects and the camerawork were top notch. I don't think they missed a single beat in making this movie look great. Bryce Dallas Howard and...god help me, Topher Grace, were more than capable in their all-too-brief screentime. Some of the fight choreography was excellent. And that's all she wrote, folks. The good stuff ends there. Notice that I didn't mention Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst or James Franco? Yeah, that's because they were so unbelievably boring that Topher Grace's scene-stealing mug was a welcome break.
Perhaps Maguire and Dunst are getting tired of the franchise (Gee, you think, given all the press they've been getting about it?). Perhaps they want to move on to other things. I say let them. Maguire in particular has done a great job and more than earned his exit. Kirsten Dunst can fall in a hole and die, goddammit. I haven't liked her since 2000, when she knocked "Bring It On" out of the park. Get Bryce on the phone, give her Kirsten Dunst's salary and rewrite everything to have Peter Parker end up with Gwen Stacey. It worked for X-Men, kind of (Storm didn't happen). Possibly, while they're at it, they can get some writers who know how to edit their scripts to a workable film. There were so many scenes in this movie that just shouldn't have been in the final cut, turning what could have possibly been a marginally good addition to the series into a bloated abortion of epic proportions.
Pirates of the Carribean, Shrek 3? You'd better deliver.
-117/365 down, 248/365 to go
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