Spider-Man 3 Review: Maybe Tobey Maguire Was Never the Problem

Spider-Man 3 promotional artwork © 2007 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. Used here for purposes of review and commentary.

I have spent most of Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy thinking that one of my problems was Tobey Maguire. Spider-Man 3 made me reconsider that. I still do not particularly like this version of Peter Parker, but the black-suit storyline makes it much easier to see how deliberately Maguire has been playing him all along.

That was the biggest surprise when rewatching the film almost two decades after its 2007 release. Neither I nor the kids could quite decide whether it is better or worse than Spider-Man 2. The second film is more coherent, but the third sometimes does more interesting things with Peter himself. Unfortunately, those things are buried inside a movie that seems determined to tell four or five stories at once.

Spider-Man 3 Has Too Much Spider-Man 3

Peter begins the film in an unusually good place. New York has embraced Spider-Man, his relationship with Mary Jane seems reasonably stable, and he is enjoying being a superhero rather more than he did in the previous film. That stability quickly disappears. An alien symbiote attaches itself to Peter and eventually forms the black Spider-Man suit, strengthening his powers while amplifying some less attractive parts of his personality. At the same time, escaped criminal Flint Marko becomes Sandman after a scientific accident, Harry Osborn continues his vendetta against Spider-Man, and rival photographer Eddie Brock increasingly intrudes into Peter's professional and personal life.

Any one of those stories could have carried much of the film. Sandman is potentially a tragedy about a dangerous man whose motives are more complicated than simple villainy. Harry's conflict with Peter has been developing across the entire trilogy and carries considerably more emotional weight than the arrival of another supervillain. The symbiote offers something different again: a story about what happens when Peter's existing flaws are given power instead of restraint.

Spider-Man 3 tries to develop all of them. Its problem is not simply that it has too many villains, but that those villains belong to different kinds of stories. Sandman is tragic, Harry is personal, Eddie Brock is driven by resentment and revenge, while the symbiote turns the conflict inward. Just as one thread begins to become interesting, the film has to leave it behind to service another.

By this point, the science has also largely stopped pretending to be science. The first Spider-Man at least gestured towards genetics and experimental research when explaining its transformations. Here a meteorite conveniently deposits an alien organism close to Peter Parker, while Flint Marko falls into a particle experiment and emerges as a man made of sand. The laboratory has become less an explanation than a ritual: put someone near sufficiently complicated machinery, wait for something to go wrong, and accept whatever superpower emerges.

That does not bother me because superhero films need scientific realism. They obviously do not. What becomes funny is how routine these events feel within the world of the trilogy. By the third instalment, catastrophic experiments and physically impossible transformations have become ordinary hazards of living near Peter Parker.

The more persistent problem is Peter's relationship with Mary Jane. Again, a remarkable amount of tension comes from two people who care about each other being terrible at listening, explaining themselves or saying what they actually mean. The problem is not that a Spider-Man film spends time on romantic drama. Peter's personal life should matter, and Harry's storyline demonstrates that intimate relationships can work very well alongside superhero action when the two reinforce each other. With Peter and MJ, however, too much conflict depends on withheld information, jealousy and misunderstandings that could often be resolved by a reasonably honest conversation. Instead of revealing new things about the characters, the drama repeatedly traps them in the same emotional pattern.

That frustration is sharper because the part of Spider-Man 3 that works best is precisely the part where Peter is finally allowed to change.

The Black Suit Changes More Than Peter

The symbiote does not transform Peter into a completely different person. It exaggerates what is already there. Confidence becomes arrogance, anger becomes aggression, resentment becomes cruelty, and Peter's desire to be recognised gradually turns into something much less sympathetic.

Maguire handles that transformation remarkably well. Costume and hair help mark the change, but much of the effect comes from the performance itself: Peter's posture changes, his expressions become harder, and he begins enjoying attention rather than merely being surprised by it.

This includes the infamous scenes of Peter swaggering through New York with his new haircut and newfound confidence. They are ridiculous, certainly, but they worked better for me this time than I remembered. I do not read Peter as suddenly becoming cool. I read him as becoming Peter Parker's idea of cool. He has spent years feeling overlooked, underestimated and socially uncertain, so when the symbiote boosts his ego he does not suddenly acquire somebody else's personality. He performs the confidence he always imagined confident people possessed.

The awkwardness does not disappear. It becomes weaponised.

The symbiote also exposes traits that were already present in ordinary Peter. He wants recognition. He enjoys being admired as Spider-Man. He carries resentment over the sacrifices he has made and the ways people have treated him. None of these feelings makes him a bad person, but the black suit removes some of the restraint that normally keeps them under control. That is what makes the storyline more interesting than a simple evil-costume plot: the symbiote does not insert darkness into an otherwise flawless hero. Peter already contains the material it needs.

Maybe Tobey Maguire Was Never the Problem

Seeing those two versions of Peter next to each other changed how I interpret Maguire's performance in the earlier films. I have never particularly enjoyed him as Spider-Man. His Peter Parker often feels excessively awkward to me, while his Spider-Man never develops quite enough charisma to compensate for it. I had tended to treat that as a limitation of Maguire's performance, but Spider-Man 3 makes that explanation harder to maintain.

When the character changes, Maguire changes with him. Normal Peter is restrained, uncomfortable and frequently uncertain of himself. Symbiote Peter is aggressive, vain, performative and convinced that everyone else should finally recognise how impressive he is. Yet he remains recognisably the same person. The contrast is too deliberate for me to keep treating ordinary Peter's awkwardness as something Maguire simply could not escape. Maybe this Peter Parker simply is not supposed to be charismatic.

That changes my assessment of the trilogy. Raimi's Peter is painfully earnest, emotionally repressed, socially uncomfortable and sometimes slightly strange even when nothing supernatural is influencing him. Maguire plays those characteristics consistently. When the symbiote removes his restraint, the resulting Peter is not the opposite character but an exaggerated version of the same one.

What I had interpreted as a casting problem now looks much more like a creative choice I happen not to enjoy very much. That does not suddenly make Maguire my favourite Spider-Man. I still prefer other interpretations of the character. But liking a portrayal and judging whether an actor performed it well are different questions, and Spider-Man 3 makes Maguire's work easier to appreciate because it forces him to show both versions side by side.

The scenes I had remembered as some of the film's most embarrassing are therefore also the scenes that make his performance clearest.

A Messy Film That Made Me Reconsider the Trilogy

The visual effects have also aged better than I expected. They are visibly the work of a 2007 blockbuster, but Sandman in particular remains impressive. His transformation works because the effects are doing more than displaying technical skill: watching a barely human collection of particles struggle to assemble itself into a person gives the scene a physical vulnerability that some of the larger action sequences lack.

That sequence illustrates what Spider-Man 3 repeatedly gets frustratingly close to becoming. Sandman could have supported a more focused story. Harry carries the payoff to a conflict stretching back to the first film. The symbiote reveals aspects of Peter that the previous movies mostly kept beneath the surface. The film does not suffer from a shortage of worthwhile material; it suffers because all that material is competing for the same space.

That makes Spider-Man 3 difficult for me to rank against Spider-Man 2. The second film is probably better constructed and has the stronger central villain. The third is messier, more crowded and sometimes considerably sillier, but I found parts of it more revealing. Peter changes enough that Maguire's performance becomes part of what the film is examining rather than merely the vehicle carrying us between action scenes and relationship problems.

That is also why the symbiote material stands out so strongly against the Peter and MJ drama. One storyline takes characteristics we already know and pushes them somewhere new. The other repeatedly returns two characters to misunderstandings we have already seen. The transformation is exaggerated and fantastical, but it tells me more about Peter Parker than many of the supposedly realistic conversations around it.

Spider-Man 3 has not convinced me that I secretly loved Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man all along. I still do not particularly like him. What it has changed is who I blame for that. Maguire may have played this version of Peter Parker almost exactly as intended. I just don't particularly like this version of Peter Parker.