My Spidey Sense is tingling! Webhead jumps the shark

Rating: 3/10 (4 May 2007)

Just caught the film last night and I have mixed emotions.
Overall, it was an enjoyable romp for a summer movie, but not without its flaws. The action scenes were very good - albeit a LOT of CG that looked obviously so. The plot was all over the place, and character development was almost non-existent. In a lot of ways, the film reminded me of "X-Men 3" - very rushed, with a storyline that jumped between the multiple plot points way too much.
The CG effects of Sandman were hit and miss IMO. In some cases - it looked really good - and others not so much. Venom was majorly underused and when he was he looked a lot like that dog Milo from "The Mask" when he sticks the mask on - overexaggerated fangs, and lacking the protruding jaw from the comics - just something didn't look right with him. Add to that the fact that even when in full on fangs and white eyes mode - Venom still speaks with Topher's voice - no effect has been added to it at all - which quite honestly looked really off! In some cases it looked like pre-viz work almost. I knew it would be hard to pull of Venom - but with today's state of the art - I was expecting something different.
Acting-wise - well - this is a comic book film, so I'm not looking for next year's potential Best Actor or Actress nominees here...When Peter goes evil mode with the black suit, the scenes are almost too much. I'm not sure what effect Raimi was looking to convey here, but I found much of the time he was just acting plain stupid. Spidey's fights while clad in black are much more brutal - with him not afraid to go beyond what is necessary in the battle - even to the extent of playing dirty. I've long stood by the theory that Dunst can't act and she once again proves it with a 2-dimensional run at MJ. Church, as Sandman, was a throwaway character. They gave him nothing to do except be a stand in for the CG department. Topher as Brock/Venom really didn't have ample time to create anything of a character - another drawback from the loopy storyline. James Franco sways between acting like Willem Dafoe - right down to the squinting left eye thing - to Degrassi mode when he has amnesia. Like I said - I'm not expecting awards here unless they're Razzies.
The big huge battle royale has its moments of pure wow factor, offset by Venom's comical appearance. For most of the fight, Topher has the face pulled away, but you do get 4 or 5 really good looks at him in full on symbiote mode. Without ruining anything, the ending was a bit of a let-down.
The Stan Lee cameo was a nice touch, and Campbell as the French waiter was funny, but the spidey sense line was right up there with the "Holy rusted metal" schtick. Again, stuff like that really detracted from the film IMO.
All in all, I suppose it's a film worth seeing - but if you go in there thinking this is the superhero film to top the likes of "Batman Begins" or the second Spider-Man, you might be disappointed. Worth the price of admission at a matinée, and I look forward to the DVD in November in hopes of some deleted material to fill in some of the gaps and make some sense of the multitude of story arcs.