I really didn't like this one at all.

Rating: 3/10 (1 April 2010)

Spider-Man 3 starts as Spider-Man's alter-ego Peter parker (Tobey Maguire) is set to propose to his long time childhood girlfriend Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst), however Pater's best friend Harry Osborn (James Franco) still blames him for the death of his father & is intent on killing Spider-Man. Meanwhile an escaped convicted murdered named Flint Marco (Thomas Haden Church) wander into a restricted proton testing range & is zapped with the result of his body being molecularly combined with sand, as the almost invincible shape-shifting Sandman he sets out to steal enough money to pay for an operation to save his daughters life as Spider-Mantries to stop him. At the same time humiliated newspaper photographer Eddie Brock (Topher Grace) is consumed by some parasitic black alien slime that makes Eddie evil & intent on killing Peter Parker & Spider-Man, both the Sandman & Brock team up together to kill Spider-Man their common enemy...
Cowritten & directed by Sam Raimi this was the third of the hugely successful live action Spider-Man films that have broken box-office records all over the world, personally I am not a huge comic book fan & I have no real liking for Spider-Man himself but I did enjoy the first two Spider-Man films although I thought Spider-Man 3 was absolutely terrible & a massive bore from start to finish. To be honest my main complaint about Spider-Man 3 is that it just felt like a rehash of the the previous two films ideas & themes without ever being as good as either of them, the strained relationship between Parker & Mary Jane, the tensions between Parker & his best friend Harry, some super villain or other terrorising New York, his landlord asking for the rent, dealing with the death of his Uncle & the problems of being a teenager are all recycled here to dull effect. At almost two & a half hours long Spider-Man 3 felt like it went on forever to me, I was really bored by the time this thing had finished. The film has themes like people's dark sides (here the script deals with hero's that have a dark side & villains that have a sympathetic side) & such but the idea that Paker just needed to pull his hair down a bit & do funny walks down New York would get all the girls to throw themselves at him come across as ridiculous. Cranky newspaper editor Johna Jameson livens things up with some very funny scenes but other than that Spider-Man 3 just felt lifeless & bland. Even the villains aren't that great, Venom only appears during the last twenty minutes while the Sandman is given a back-story about his daughter & the fact he killed Peter's Uncle which were not in the comic books & just feels a bit pointless other than to carry on the themes from the first two films.
I brought this really cheap on a second hand Blu-Ray & I have to say I want my money back, an unimpressive film & a flat looking Blue-Ray means the hi-def CGI computer effects look pretty average at times. The action set-pieces this time around feel laboured & daft, the fight between Peter & Harry on a glider feels like a video game while I personally thought the crane smashing into the skyscraper was the best moment although the giant Sandman at the end is quite cool but doesn't really do much. Personally I don't think any sequence here comes anywhere near as close to the two sequences in Spider-Man 2 where Spider-Man & Doctor Ock battle it out climbing up skyscrapers or the cool out of control train fight scene. The CGI varies, some of it is excellent while at other times it's rather fake looking. The IMDb's Trivia section lists all sorts of facts & figures that I assume are meant to impress but only disappoint more as the amount of time, money & effort spent on Spider-Man 3 was enormous & the end product just so bad. It's no surprise to learn that there were re-shoots that went on for eight months apparently.
With a reported budget of around $250,000,000 plus addition re-shoots, evolving CGI computer effect technology insiders say this might have cost as much as $350,000,000 in the end. The acting is OK but I just didn't warm to anyone particularly & Maguire's bad boy sequence is just laughable.
Spider-Man 3 is a film that I really disliked, I was literally sat there wanting it to finish so I could watch something else I was that bored by it. The first two Spider-Man films are much better than this huge disappointment & waste of huge potential.