Sticky situation

Rating: 4/10 (3 September 2015)

Box-office success that it was, this Spider Man sequel shows the same traits of slackness and tiredness that the Superman and Batman films of the Christopher Reeve and Tim Burton eras did. The film's become much longer, indeed bloated, the action sequences become fewer and attempts at often campy but unfunny humour intrude.
That's not all that's wrong with this movie. The SFX are not of the best quality, an important piece of Spidey history gets re-written, as Uncle Ben gets murdered again, but this time by a different guy who of course, morphs into our hero's latest home-town super- villain plus there are just too many villains competing to down the web-slinger. Between Venom, The Hobgoblin (or the New Goblin as he's termed here) and Sandman, too many crooks definitely spoil the broth.
Peter Parker's on-off romance with Kirsten Dunst's rather dismal Mary Jane Parker trundles on too and of course he has his usual existential crisis triggered this time by being taken over by an alien micro-organism which twists his mind but for some reason has a weakness for loud clanging noises. The plot too seems borrowed from "Superman 2" meets Star Wars as Spider Man gets in touch with his bad self, losing his popularity and his girl as he does so. Throw in a lame attempt at humour which sees Pete come over all John Travolta and yet another unnecessary Stan Lee cameo and you can see why this seems to me by far the weakest entry in the franchise so far.
I don't know the exact reasons why Marvel chose to reboot Spider Man after this admittedly very successful entry, at least judging by its box-office returns, but the signs of wear are there. I just found the endless shots of the expressionless faces of Maguire and Dunst only added to the tedium, the former only occasionally gets into costume and finally who was it who put the title end sequence at the start of the movie, holding up proceedings interminably it seemed.
I've still to watch the most recent remake of the title character but hope it manages to spin back to the promise of the first film of this particular three.