Spotty

Rating: 7/10 (1 July 2007)

This movie it like a collection of short stories stitched together with the flimsiest glue. There is brilliance. The animation of the birth of the sand creature is perhaps the best realistic animation I have ever seen on screen. It was sheer poetry, movie magic at its best.
I really enjoyed swinging along with Peter between buildings in the first Spider Man movie. I did not get that enjoyment this time. The action was speeded up so much I felt an outsider watching machines zip about hyped up on some alien drug. It was all too fast to follow and too exaggerated to accept as real. I was no longer a participant, merely an observer.
I am gay and this movie offers up acres of male eye candy. Topher Grace (aka Eric Forman) drops his nerd persona and plays an irresistibly sexy, evil character. James Franco looks like some 50s pop idol with a smile that could melt steel. Thomas Hayden Church is massive, hard and terrifying in his intensity.
It is a metaphoric morality tale where evil, drugs, power are represented by a black, enveloping, alien life force. These black strands bestow power, euphoria and magnify character defects, just like drugs or war. I took the movie as a metaphor for the way the USA has become corrupted and needs to return to its old red-white-and-blue morality, not stooping to selfishness, sadism, gluttony and greed.
There are four villains Spidy has to contend with, often ganging up on him. The movie dragged a bit for me. However, some of the scenes with the sand creature were so entrancing the rest of the movie was irrelevant. Later on in the movie, the animation was dreadful -- reminiscent of an old Godzilla movie. It was like seeing an old Vermeer painting touched up by Ronald McDonald.