Conceptually, Mysterio’s gimmick is pretty cool – he uses special effects technology to manipulate the world around him and drop people into nightmare scenarios that leave them questioning reality. Jake Gyllenhaal transformed Mysterio, a punchline villain from Spider-Man’s rogues gallery, into one of the most fun bad guys I’ve ever seen in a superhero movie. Spider-Man 3 just had too many characters, so Venom gets relegated to a brief action scene in the final 20 minutes. But I like the visual design of the character when the costume peels back to reveal Grace’s face – the way the tendrils pull at his skin looks agonizingly painful, a concept that pairs well with his wild-eyed frenzy and literal shark teeth. And the “otherworldly” shriek he emits is, to put it gently, fucking stupid.
Of course, once he gets the alien suit, it kind of falls apart – in one of the film’s most absurd scenes, Venom is just randomly swinging around New York City until he literally bumps into Sandman and devises a hasty team-up.
He’s a smug, sleezy version of Peter, and the two get caught in a game of oneupsmanship trying to dick each other over. And while I acknowledge that Spider-Man 3’s interpretation of the character is a far cry from how he appears in the comics, I actually really enjoy Grace’s performance. Topher Grace’s portrayal of Venom is still a point of controversy among Spider-Man fans, because geeks never get tired of talking about how much they hate their favorite things. I won’t mince words here, folks - it is extremely whack. At the end, Sandman shares a good cry with Peter before turning to sand and floating away on the wind like Mary Poppins. Sandman could be a visually interesting character, but really all we get to see him do is transform into a gigantic sand hulk that apparently costs him the power of speech, because he just grunts monosyllabically as he very slowly tries to crush the webslinger.
Thomas Haden Church came right off of his Oscar nom into Spider-Man 3 and gets thoroughly wasted in a convoluted storyline that retroactively makes him Uncle Ben’s killer, except it was an accident you guys, he was only trying to get money for his sick daughter, who is afflicted with Chronic Plot Device. He’s basically the T-1000, if the T-1000 was made entirely of dirty playground sediment. Another one of Spidey’s oldest villains, small-time thug Flint Marko tumbles into some kind of 1960s science bullshit and gains the power of sand, allowing him to change his body shape and size at will. Boy, Sandman should’ve been way cooler than this.
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