below average

Rating: 6/10 (6 May 2007)

I didn't like this film, for a number of reasons. I'm growing weary of the Peter-MJ-Harry love triangle. The stories would be a lot more focused if those relationships weren't intricate to the plot. To me, the minutiae of the subplots is distracting. I don't care whether they're together or not. I care about the relationship between Spider-Man and the criminal. There were too, too many sub-plots in this movie -- MJ and Peter, MJ and Harry, Peter and Harry, Peter and the Sandman, Peter and the obnoxious punk photographer -- uggh, enough already! At some point, it stopped being a comic book story and started being a soap opera. That's not what action comic-book movies are supposed to be. They should have complex characters, which this one does, but not complex plots. Next, they muddled the previous films by re-writing history. It was important to the first two Spider-Man movies that Peter Parker let his uncle's killer get away when he had the chance to stop him. Now, they're saying he wasn't the killer? There was no need for this revisionist history. The layer of guilt Peter Parker had in him in the first two films is now gone. Why did they do this? The black version of Spider-Man was overdone and overacted and unnecessary. The evil haircut they gave Parker was stupid. With all of their technology, that's all they came up with? That said, in theater where I saw this, people laughed and applauded. I left wondering whether they had ever seen a movie before. They obviously had never seen a good one.