Bad Movies We Love: Spider-Man 3

You heard it here first (or, rather, last): He's emo Jean-Claude Van Damme. He is the frontman of the novelty band Dashboard Kickboxer. He is my favorite thing to happen to this franchise. After exposing Eddie as a fraud, he decides to strut around NYC like an entitled, dancing douchebag. It's supposed to be funny? Except every woman is staring at him lustfully? You explain it to me.

I like this sort of goofiness better when it's... a silly music video from 2002.

But the braggadocio goes on: Peter invades a local pub where his failed actress girlfriend Tepidia Newton-John is crooning. After calling a hostess "Hot Lips" (because Tobey is as believable here as Alan Alda would be), he seizes the opportunity to humiliate her two-timing ass in front of jiving patrons by staging an elaborate dance routine. He makes it seem like hapless bystander Gwen Stacy (Bryce Dallas Howard) is complicit in the choreography, but her Cindy Margolis dye job gives away her naivete.

After he accidentally smacks Mary Jane and legitimizes domestic abuse for the comic-book demographic, the movie retreats into routine: Mary Jane is captured by Venom (Eddie in black-Gak guile) and Sandman (Thomas Haden Church, looking like Duke Nukem awash in leftover CGI from The Mummy Returns), and Spidey saves her. Harry ends up dead, but not in a bracing 127 Hours way. He's just impaled at some point like an average Naomi Campbell assistant. Fine.

But don't worry, the movie closes with one of those pointless one-liners that turns everything we've seen into a tale of everyman heroics:

"It's the choices that make us what we are," Peter says. "And we can always choose to do what's right."

Or we can choose to be an angst-ridden rat king and dancefloor bandit. Sorry, Spider-Man, but we know superhuman antics when we see them -- and your strut is divine.

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