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Spider-Man 3
EMAILPRINTColumbia Pictures / Sony Pictures Releasing

Mixed or average reviews
Based on 40 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 559 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Action | Adventure | Sci-fi | Suspense/Thriller
Written by:
Sam Raimi
Ivan Raimi (also screen story)
Alvin Sargent
Stan Lee and Steve Ditko (Marvel comic book)
Directed by: Sam Raimi
Release Date:
Theatrical: May 4, 2007
DVD: October 30, 2007
Running Time: 140 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: PG-13 for sequences of intense action violence
Starring Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Thomas Haden Church, Topher Grace, Bryce Dallas Howard, James Cromwell, and Rosemary Harris
Spider-Man 3 reunites the cast and filmmakers from the first two blockbuster adventures for a web of secrets, vengeance, love, and forgiveness. (Columbia Pictures)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Drag Me to Hell Spider-Man Spider-Man 2 The Quick and the Dead
GAMES: Spider-Man 3 (Xbox 360)
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
New York Daily News Jack Mathews
With nifty new villains, a revived Green Goblin, plus $300 million worth of aerial special effects, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3 is definitely good to go.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
This is a wonderfully imagined, heartfelt piece of pop entertainment that soars not only for its spectacular eye candy, but also during the moments when its protagonists simply stand still and talk to each other. How many comic-book movies can you say that about?
Read Full Review >Time Richard Corliss
Where can mass-moviegoers find release for their tenderer feelings? Only at dozens of inspirational sports movies, where guys (on screen and in the audience) get to cry and cheer and win. And, this weekend, at Spider-Man 3.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek
The good news about Spider-Man 3 is that it's more of the same -- except better.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Michael Rechtshaffen
The wow factor works overtime with state-of-the-art effects sequences that often are as beautiful as they are astonishing.
Read Full Review >Newsweek David Ansen
The juiciest battle here is Spidey vs. Spidey, or, if you prefer, superego vs. id. When Peter starts to go seriously bad, the movie becomes seriously fun.
Read Full Review >New York Post Lou Lumenick
Overly long and complicated, it's packed with crowd-pleasing moments and satisfactorily wraps up the trilogy - without quite capturing the magic of the first two installments.
Read Full Review >USA Today Claudia Puig
Solidly entertaining and possesses dazzling special effects, but it falls short of the near-perfection of the Spidey sequel.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Wesley Morris
Raimi, who shares script credit with his brother Ivan and Alvin Sargent, strikes an exquisite balance between pop and woe, drama and whooshing adventure.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
Raimi and company deftly balance spectacle and character-based drama, occasionally tweaking the comic-book mythology but always respecting creator Stan Lee's idea that costumed crime-fighter Peter Parker's life as Spider-Man isn't all derring-do and public accolades.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
There are delicious bits aplenty in Spider-Man 3 for those who care to notice.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
The experience is fun enough that it's sure to be the summer's first blockbuster.
Read Full Review >Slate Dana Stevens
There are plenty of pleasures here: The slow birth of the Sandman from a heap of supercharged sand crystals (or something) is a marvel of digital animation, and the chemistry between Dunst and Maguire feels like the dynamic of a real couple, full of subtle shifts and eloquent silences.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Clint Morris
What saves Spider-Man 3 from becoming well, "Superman III," is the fact that it's still a solid film that packs a punch when it comes to turn on the spectacle.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Noel Murray
So Spider-Man 3's action is superb and its theme fairly weighty. Then why does it feel a letdown from its predecessor? Nearly all the blame rests with director Sam Raimi, who's taken the success of some light slapstick moments in Spider-Man 2 as a cue to get even sillier.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
Spider-Man 3 has terrific moments, but after the danger and majesty and romantic brio of "Spider-Man 2," those adrenalized rooftop ballets feel, more than ever, like sequences.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
In short, there are way too many storylines here, especially for a movie that turns stiff whenever it's on the ground. When cascading through the cityscape, Spider-Man 3 still makes us gasp with delight, but on Earth those gasps come solely in reaction to the cynical dreariness of the script.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
Spider-Man 3 is a likeable film -- Maguire's personality, or Raimi's channeled through him, is genuinely charming. But the tenor of the film is too often too muted, melancholy and enervated for something of its size.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
The sprawling canvas ultimately dwarfs the plucky title figure and makes him seem too small in every way.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
Far from a flop, and I'm sure the Spider-maniacs will eat it up. For me, it's a buffet without much aftertaste.
Read Full Review >Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
If the longest and beefiest "Spider-Man" movie to date were a baseball player, it would be tested tomorrow for steroids. That won't stop "S-M 3" from hitting a home run at the box-office, where fans will roar.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
The main flaw is an over-abundance of villains, a bout of narrative greediness that sees them marching out of their lairs like so many evil-doers-on-parade.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
It's not dull, exactly, but neither is it much fun.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
You want big wows with this sort of entertainment, and the wows here are medium.
Read Full Review >Premiere Glenn Kenny
This incarnation of Spider Man seems to forget that its source material was a comic book that wanted to transcend its genre. This is a movie that's content to be pretty good within its genre, with the main distinction of being much bigger than any of its competition.
Read Full Review >Empire Chris Hewitt
Still smart, still exciting and still action-packed. It's just a shame to note that, after promising greatness, all Spider-Man 3 delivers is satisfaction.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine David Edelstein
The movie isn't a dud: It has exuberant bits and breathtaking (money money money) effects. But it's supposed to be fun and inspirational, and it's too leaden for liftoff.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
Given how bogus the movie is whenever it departs from formula, it's not surprising that the funniest bit (in which Peter Parker becomes a disco smoothie) is stolen from Jerry Lewis's "The Nutty Professor" or that the best special effects, involving a gigantic Sandman, dimly echo "King Kong."
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
Will the extremely extravagant special effects prove sufficient to sustain the picture? Surely they will, this time. Still, there's a sense of fatigue in the scenes that don't involve high-tensile webs and high-tension suspense.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Manohla Dargis
The bittersweet paradox of this franchise is that while the stories have grown progressively less interesting the special effects have improved tremendously, becoming at once more plausible -- when Spider-Man swings through the urban canyons he finally looks almost real -- and more spectacular.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
Spider-Man and the first sequel were breezy adventures - easy and fun to sit through. Spider-Man 3 is a chore. The effective moments require a lot patience to uncover and some of what has to be shifted to get to them is not worth the effort. People love trilogies because it's said that good things come in threes, but this series would have looked better and felt more satisfying had the filmmakers stopped at two.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
Spider-Man 3 is, in short, a mess. Too many villains, too many pale plot strands, too many romantic misunderstandings, too many conversations, too many street crowds looking high into the air and shouting "oooh!" this way, then swiveling and shouting "aaah!" that way.
Read Full Review >Variety Todd McCarthy
A sense of strain envelops the proceedings this time around. One can feel the effort required to suit up one more time, come up with fresh variations on a winning formula and inject urgency into a format that basically needs to be repeated and, due to audience expectations, can't be toyed with or deepened very much.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
Though aspects of it are entertaining, the presence of all these mismatched pieces give Spider-Man 3 an ungainly, cumbersome feeling, as if its plot elements were the product of competing contractors who never saw the need to cooperate on a coherent final product.
Read Full Review >Dallas Observer Robert Wilonsky
Overstuffed (three villains), overlong (at more than two hours and 20 minutes) and undercooked (plot points include amnesia and alien goo).
Read Full Review >The New Yorker Anthony Lane
That's the problem with this third installment of the franchise: not that it's running out of ideas, or lifting them too slavishly from the original comic, but that it lunges at them with an infantile lack of grace, throwing money at one special effect after another and praying--or calculating--that some of them will fly.
Read Full Review >Village Voice Nathan Lee
Given that Spider-Man 2 was twice as fun as the first, it's triply disappointing what an overwrought bore S3 turns out to be.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Scott Foundas
The satirical jabs at celebrity culture smell like rotted leftovers from "The Fantastic Four." The token ruminations on the tension between a superhero's public and private lives seem flown in from Bryan Singer's "Superman Returns" (to say nothing of Raimi's own, superior "Darkman"). Most egregious, though, is the way Raimi and the writers reduce Spider-Man 3 to the very sort of abject distinctions between virtue and sin that the series has heretofore studiously avoided.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Ann Hornaday
An overlong, visually incoherent, mean-spirited and often just plain awful Spider-Man 3.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
"Spider-Man 2" was a textbook example of how to make a sequel: Deepen it, make it funnier, give it more heart and come up with a strong villain and a good story. Spider Man 3, by contrast, shows how not to make a sequel.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 6.0 (out of 10) based on 559 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Catherine N. gave it a7:
Spider Man could be a good teaching material for children, especially the Episode One. Spider Man’s uncle just told him that “With great power comes great responsibility.” It means a lot to children and also adults. Almost every child has the dream to be the super man, but they do not know how to use the power, neither do adults. Sometimes we just misunderstand the power or the super power, we wish we could have it but we do not know how to use it. We wish we could have the magic ring and when we need help, the spirit in the ring would solve everything for us. When I was a little child, I wish I could have the Aladdin’s lamp and I could call the spirit in the lamp to do homework for me. The first wish would be “Help me to do my homework.” The second wish would be “Help me to do my homework.” And the third wish would be “Give me another three wishes.” It is just like the one who has the ability to make himself omnipotent makes him omnipotent. To us, the super power is the thing could make our life better and if we have the power the first thing we want to do might not be protecting the earth or bring the peace to this world, but getting as many our favorite things as possible immediately. Even if we have the power, how could we make this world stay peaceful forever? Only when everyone or at least every head of this world knows “With great power comes great responsibility.” then we would have a better place in this planet. Maybe Mr. Bush is the example for missing this course.
Peter P. gave it a9:
Hey, Christopher P. (below) get a grip man, it was a comic book movie!! If you want reality, go watch a documentary! This movie was entertaining and fun to watch. Venom deserved his own movie though! Keep making em' big Raimi and I can't wait for part 4 starring Carnage and Reptile!!
S S gave it a2:
The worst sequel I've ever seen to a good movie. What was Raimi on when he made this piece of crap?! Its like all the actors forgot how to act, all the writers forgot how to write! This travesty reduces the glory of Spider-Man, one of the greatest superheroes of all time, to a streaming pile of dog droppings. When you see Tobey, fresh from his emo stupor sway dancing through the crowds midway through the picture, that should be a good indication to leave the theater, if you haven't done so already.
lj h gave it a6:
The action sequences in this film are pretty impressive, and the narrative works well too. But there are some moments that are just cringe-worthy. When a film actually includes the line 'he seems to have appeared from no where, just when all hope seemed lost', that's when it makes you want to gag. Plus watching a talented actor like Toby McGuire being wasted on trying to portray a 'badass' Spidey is just embarrassing. What makes this point worse is that when Harry (another central character) goes through his evil phase as the new Goblin, it's a lot more convincing and interesting. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I didn;t enjoy the film, it just took the whole 'cheesey' factor way too far.
Chris B. gave it a7:
It's okay, it lasts a bit to long and I wish there was more venom in this, I don't care about sandman, goblin and venom would have been perfect, great fighting scenes though
Christopher P. gave it a1:
Insensible, hollow, soulless crap, even moreso if compared to the previous chapter. Nothing about it works like it should. There are plot illogicalities that will make absolutely anyone ask themselves, "Huh?" For starters, why did Parker think it was a good idea to make out with that new girl in front of everyone, then follow up with a planned proposal to his official girlfriend? Was he oblivious that she just might be there watching the whole time? Then, when the girl shows up out of nowhere and talks about how she kissed Spider-Man, it never seems to register in him that something's not right then. So then, after it's proven that Parker's a douche, we immediately are given a sad scene with Parker crying as we learn Sandman was his uncle's killer. Uh, okay, I thought the movie wanted me to feel resentment for Parker's overt arrogance for a second there, but this sad music wants me to feel sympathetic for something else? Also, I know a romantic subplot is necessary, and I expected it completely, but most of this movie was a soap opera, one for which I wasn't rooting for the main angst figure that is Parker. Parker does stupid, insensitive things the entire film. When he's not making us hate him by hurting everyone's emotions (and, in Harry's case, detonating a grenade next to his face), he's trying to do it by being a whiny little bitch who doesn't seem to understand why any of it's happening. The soap opera factor reaches critical mass, though, when Harry tells Parker he's "the other guy" that MJ is after, right after MJ tells him in tears that it's over while he pulls out his engagement ring, also in tears. I understand some amount of drama is to be expected in this movie, but we're so relentlessly bombarded with histrionic drivel and sad piano music it's impossible not to get sick of it long before it's over. I mean, for Christ's sake, we get an -AMNESIA- plot device, one that's become a parody for TV dramas in itself. Further, one of my main reasons for going into the theater was to see Venom kick some ass. Unfortunately, while the romantic subplot was unfolding, and something which I guess is supposed to resemble comic relief in the infamous "emo-Parker" sequences, I spent the first two-thirds of the movie asking myself, "Where the Hell is Venom?" When he finally got on, we get nothing at all worth watching. Also, referring back to the grenade exploding a few inches by Harry's face, if anyone didn't notice, that same grenade that managed to cause just a burn completely obliterated Venom. Nothing else really comes together to redeem it. The dialogue is unbelievably stupid and trite, the special effects are overproduced to oblivion and silliness, and the best parts involved the news station comedy bits. Don't even get me started on the emo-Parker comic relief scene, which could not possibly have been more over-the-top inappropriate. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to be laughing, or if it was some kind of message about Parker still being a spiteful jerk. I saw no good reason to feel bad for him while he cold-heartedly caused every event of his own miserable luck. Crushingly disappointing after the ridiculously awesome previous entry. Just abysmal.
Joe S gave it a2:
Horrible compared to the first two, this was more of a chick flick
