Dull, Repetitive, and Shapeless

Rating: 4/10 (1 July 2004)

I was very surprised by my lack of response to this movie considering the glowing reviews. But I found it to be pretty lame, repetitive, dull, and shapeless. My wife absolutely hated it, and the audience I was with was bored and unresponsive. The focus on character is nice, but the material just wears you out after a while, and there is no real driving force to the plot. Cutting about thirty minutes would help. Giving Doc Ock a real plotline would have helped. Cutting out some of the repetitive scenes would have helped. Excising that ill-conceived I'm-losing-my-powers stuff would have helped. All in all, everyone clearly gave this their all, but it's not very good. Better than the first one? Sure, Willem Dafoe in a plastic suit killed that one. But this one is hardly the "perfect" film the critics have bizarrely claimed it to be. It's really just another 2-1/2 star film with a lot of good will toward Spidey.