a lot of silliness with some decent action

Rating: Null/10 (19 July 2004)

I had a hard time with this movie. I will concede that the action was pretty good, but overall I found the plot weak and not terribly compelling. Most movies don't bother me, but I had a hard time suspending my disbelief on this one which prevented me from really getting into it. So Dr. Oc has come up with an ingenious fusion device. Ok, no sweat. What I found hard to buy was that for the sheer convenience of his work he just sat down and came up with a set of 4 nearly indestructible metal arms that he wired into his spine, which, by the way, were equipped with super intelligence capable of taking over his brain. This makes absolutely no sense. First of all, the development of such a thing would be equal to that of any fusion device. Secondly, there is absolutely no reason such a device would have to be equipped with super AI. And finally, when he is using it at first it really does not look like he really needs to have these extra intelligent arms. It would have been nice had they done a little more work to introduce the evil arms in a more plausible manner.
The other thing that got me was that Dr. Oc was perfectly willing to do Harry's bidding and bring him spiderman to get some tritium. Ok, come on. You are an evil villian with 4 powerful indestructable arms capable of crushing someone's skull and you are on a crazy rampage to rebuild your fusion reactor with no desire to stop and consider anything else. Would you: A) agree to hunt down spiderman and bring him back to get your tritium or B) start pulling off his fingers one by one until he hands it over. Hmmmmm. This part of the plot (which was quite a major part) made no sense to me at all. The Dr. doesn't care about spiderman, he cares about his fusion, why would he waste time chasing spiderman around?
Finally, the science here was a bit sketchy. Tritium, of which it was critical to have for use in the fusion reactor (this part is true), is supposedly very rare and only 25 lbs of it exist on earth. Ok... Tritium is not rare and occurs natrually or can be produced in a nuclear reactor. Do you have a glow in the dark watch? Hey, that probably has tritium in it. See any exit signs that glow? Those have tritium in them too. I know, it's just a movie, but still... They could have at least made up something he needed to make it a bit more believable.

Finally, the acting in this movie was a bit sub par. James Franco as Harry is not the least bit believable, come on who buys him as a powerful intelligent leader of a major research company? The Dr. himself seemed a bit over the top. Toby did ok, however some of the dialogue he was fed was dripping with cheese and there is only so much you can do with that.
Overall, it was ok if you can easily suspend your belief. Personally I would have rather waited until it came out on video and saved some money.