It has a 7.6 rating on the IMDb. It has 66% on Rotten Tomatoes. It has 60 on Metacritic. That’s not being “held in such contempt.” So the whole thesis of the OP is wrong. It is just usually considered a distinctly lesser movie than the first two films.
“Okay, now, if you have 003 and I give you another 004, that makes how much? 003 plus 004? Class? Anyone? Come on, people, this is easy…”
Sofia Coppola is a lot of the problem. The acting, the character, etc.
However, there are other aspects too… the budding romance between cousins (even as step-half-cousins or whatever they are) never really gets past the creep-out factor, for me.
What works in the previous ones there are characters that are basically archetypes of personalities. Sonny’s emblematic of being driven by passion, Tom is driven by logic, Fredo is guided by social & friendships, and all are blind to the shortcomings their own pigeonholing burdens them with…
3 has characters that are emblematic of… what? What do you take away from a young man who wants to be in the ballet? And his father doesn’t want him to… but not because he thinks it’s a sissy thing (or at least Michael doesn’t say anything like that)… he just… doesn’t.
nitpick: Opera, not ballet. Though as I mentioned recently in a thread- isn’t it a tad odd that somebody decides to become a professional opera singer in their late 20s and tells their father “I don’t want your blessing and you can go to help” then immediately gets the romantic lead in a major venue in a country where his father just happens to have given $100 million yet never seems to think it’s anything other than talent?
And George Hamilton: he’s not incapable as an actor but as lawyer for a mob-boss-trying-to-go-legit? True Michael wants respectability but he doesn’t have to hire the country club owner from an Elvis movie; Michael Corleone would need a hard as nails lawyer and would probably have an Alan Dershowitz (or his NYC equivalent) rather than an aged WASP pretty boy to be his right hand guy.
Then there’s the Eli Wallach character- where’s he come from? And yet he’s Connie’s godfather? Why?
Robert Duvall said it was purely money that caused him to turn down the money; he said he could accept Pacino making more than him but not that much more (I don’t remember the salaries but Pacino was getting more than twice what Duvall was). If he had accepted I wonder if it would have been the same script or if there was a Hagan sideplot.
My problem with Sofia Coppola’s role was not that she was bad it was that I just didn’t care. I watch the Godfather movies to watch gangsters kill each other. I couldn’t care less about some girl’s romantic yearnings. The part could have been played by Winona Ryder giving an Oscar winning performance and I still would have considered it a waste of my time.
You may be correct on those numbers, but I submit as evidence some of the posts in this thread, as well as (anecdotally) people I’ve talked to. By the way, I feel my question’s been answered.
Dude, Where’s My Car? and Star Wars Episode I aren’t contemptible movies either, just not very good ones.
Oh I hold GF3 in such contempt that it makes me wanna stand up and yell “this whole damn court is out of ordah”, but then that would somehow just be justifying Al Pacino’s having gone nuts 
“If I were the man I was 10 years ago I’d take a FLAMETHROWAH to this place! And Fredo, Don Abbandando and Pope John Paul I, f*ck you tooooo! HOO-WAH!”
One of my favorite YouTube clips is The Lincoln Assassination starring Christopher Walken (Booth) and Al Pacino (as Lincoln). It’s pretty much every role Pacino’s played since about 1982.
Only the young Vito plot is from the novel. The novel ends more or less where G1 ends, with just a brief coda with Mike established as a more or less legitimate casino owner. The present day storyline in G2 is original to the movie.
The movie would be largely a bore even if Sofia Coppola had been replaced, but she’s definitely a very weak link. Partly because her acting is so amateurish, and partly because…
Look, I’m not a particularly handsome man, and even if I were, I get NO enjoyment out of criticizing somebody else’s looks. But Sofia Coppola was nowhere near attractive enough for her role.
We’re supposed to believe that Andy Garcia is so enamored of her that he’d risk his position in the Mob for her. Can ANYBODY buy that? Can anybody suspend belief that much?A MUCH more beaufitful and charismatic actress was called for.
Also, just how long was that cannoli Eli Wallach was eating? It seemed to take him an hour to get it all down?
With a little practice I could probably do a better Pacino impression, and that’s saying something.
The guy doing Walken is pretty good, but there are about a half-billion pretty good Walken impersonators out there.
I think Sofia is achingly beautiful. I know I might be out there on this one, but to each his own. I also noticed at the time the movie came out that much of the criticism of her performance actually revolved around her appearance.
Not from my end. She could have been Sofia Loren and she still would have been awful. I watched the movie with F.F. Coppola’s commentary once and he still won’t admit she was less than perfect; he told the story of how Winona Ryder was signed/got sick/day before shooting/blah blah/and how Sofia stepped in, but I’m not buying it. (You’re Francis Ford Coppola and you can’t find an actress, name or otherwise, for a major part in a Godfather movie? I’d think you could make a call and have 20 girls scratching and clawing each other to play just a minor role in one of your movies.)
He did say “this was her first major role and sometimes her nervousness showed through”, which if nervousness means “sucked so hard the talent from other performers was pulled out of the scene” then we’re in agreement. He also said on that commentary that he’d always seen The Godfather movies as essentially non-musical operas- which I can see- so he planned from the 1970s on that if there were ever a GODFATHER III an opera would now officially have a major role in the movie.
As much as Sofia Coppola sucked in this movie, I always thought Andy Garcia’s performance was worse. I cringed at his every line.
It’s been almost 20 years since I watched Godfather III, so it’s difficult to recall anything specific, but I do remember being bored to tears by it and constantly checking my watch to see if it might be over soon. The first two are wonderful, and I’ve watched them again. But for Part 3, I’ve never cared to waste another 3 hours like that again.
“It insists upon itself.”
Michael damned himself beyond redemption in II by not finding a way to let Fredo live. The only point of III would have been to have found redemption anyway. That was what Michael was trying to do in III. He failed utterly. But it wasn’t made clear that the reason he failed was his failure to truly repent and do the necessary penance. In fact, it was a half-assed effort on his part. That doesn’t make for good theater.
There’s a good section in the book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind about how most of the major directors in the place and time the book is about (in the U.S. from the late 1960’s to the early 1980’s) burned out. Yeah, Coppola was able to do The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Conversation, and Apocalyse Now at one point, but now he’s reduced to movies like Jack. Lucas has fallen from Star Wars to the later trilogy. And they aren’t the worst of the lot. William Friedkin went from being one of the most promising young directors to falling off the map as an interesting director. He at least was able to recognize what had happened to him. In Biskind’s book, he even admits that he is no longer able to distinguish good movies from bad movies.
Burning out is more common than you might think for directors. The Godfather Part III isn’t very good. It isn’t contemptible, but it’s just well below the level of the first two films. Likewise, the later Star Wars films are well below the level of the first ones, but they aren’t contemptible. There are lots of contemptible films made. You can find some of them playing on your TV or at your local movie house at the moment. It doesn’t help us to call merely mediocre films contemptible. What will we call the really contemptible ones then?
Two words: Sofia Coppola
“Daaaaaaaaad?”