The Best Bad Movie Ever Made
Lookit: making movies is hard, man. You have to be on top of so many things. You have to have a clear vision, and you need to carry it out. You need to construct something that has unity, clarity, and coherence. It can’t just go along in a straight line. It needs to arc ever up, building one moment upon the last, developing as it goes until it achieves the nirvana of catharsis or renewal or whateverthefuckelse kind of climax before drifting gently back to earth on the gossamer strands of its own denouement.
Spider-Man 3 does all of these things. It just does them in the service of awfulness.
I pretty much hated Spider-Man 1 and Spider-Man 2, which already makes me an asshole among the comic book aesthetes, but nothing prepared me for loving the final film in Raimi’s spider-franchise as much as I do. Oh, I love it so much. It is my Blu-ray-and-a-bottle-of-rum movie of choice, on any day when I feel shitty about anything.Spider-Man 3 is the most dastardly creation of badness in all filmdom. It is, like only a handful of other things, a Perfect Film. That its perfection should be in the degree to which it is in every way not good, is merely a quibble. Bridges aren’t this well constructed. Space shuttles don’t operate with this kind of precision. Spider-Man 3 is the apex of a hundred years of learning how to make shitty movies. It is the pièce de résistance, the graduate thesis. It is the bad movie Stanley Kubrick would have made, if he had wanted to show the world how bad movies should really work.
Every scene in Spider-Man 3 is bad. More importantly, though, every scene ismountingly bad. Each moment in this film builds on the moment before – builds on thebadness of the moment before – to achieve an enhanced badness of its own. Eisenstein would admire this cinematic collision, down to the very edits. With each passing moment, Spider-Man 3 accumulates badness, accumulates exponential momentum for its badness. Physics classes could be taught off this shit. Spider-Man 3 argues for badness, and with each passing moment, develops its argument. It goes batshittier and batshittier by the ticking seconds of its corpulent two and a six half-hour running time until,
yes,
Peter Parker walks out of a clothing store dressed in purple H&M and black velvet, and dances in the fucking street.
He’s evil, by that point, in a plot cribbed entirely from Spider-Man 3‘s prototype in the Best Bad Movie Ever Made sweepstakes, Superman 3. We can tell Peter has become evil because he has, in the parlance of 2007, become emo. Good boys are not emo; good boys propose to their girlfriends and look after their aging aunts. Peter, though, got bukkaked by black alien space-spunk; and now, emboldened by a black spider-suit and pissed off once too many by the innocent stupidities of Kirsten Dunst, has swept his hair forward, and put circles around his eyes.
Peter goes to where Mary-Jane works and bitchslaps her around with a dance number and some emotional thuggery, while unprompted disasteria occasionally puncture the “story” like trainee machine-gun fire. (Watch while Gwen Stacy is introduced, contextualized, and thrown out a skyscraper window by an out-of-control girder thatcomes out of nowhere. That girder is the plot, my friends. That girder is the plot.) Wearing a costume from 1982, James Franco goes evil, goes amnesiac, goes good, goes evil some more. Wears a scar, throws a pumpkin bomb, gets told that everything he’s so pissed off about could have been enlivened from frame fucking one by the butler who has been sitting around for two and a half complete feature films with his thumb stuck squarely up his ass.
There’s a man made out of sand and a Topher Grace made out of frosted hair tips and a oh who fucking cares any more, by the third act of this film I am inevitably so drunk I actually think Mary-Jane is some kind of superhero because how did she get up in that taxicab dangling from the black goo, anyway? Well, I don’t know. But I know this: you need to work hard to make anything this wholeheartedly coherent. This thing isn’t taken down by a bit of unfortunate dialogue, or an underperformer in the cast, or logistical troubles on set. It is taken down by everything. Every. Single. Thing. This is the brick shithouse of bad movies. It is unassailable. There is nowhere for goodness to even gain a foothold. Spider-Man 3 argues for bad, and wins hands-down.
Honestly, it provokes euphoria in me. The achievement is so monumental as to be dizzying. The point is this: get a studio to give you $250 million to make a bad movie sometime. It is fan-fucking-tastic. And you’re going to make one against which all others will forever be judged.
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