And they call this a super hero movie?

Rating: 2/10 (23 May 2007)

To be perfectly honest and frank, I'm not the biggest fan of super hero movies, I tend to find them nothing but 2 hour action extravaganza's (I hope I spelled that right), they tend to have little plot, bad dialog and weak plots, however one movie changed all this, and this was Spiderman. Now with a 3rd movie under the belt, is it doing anything for the franchise, the answer is no.
Many films this year are suffering from threequilitis, Pirates 3, Shrek the Third, and Spiderman 3 has got a really bad dose of it.
The film starts off with a bang, a really great action sequence involving Spiderman and Harry through the alleys of New York city. But after the first half hour the film starts to become ridiculous.
The first major problem is the amount of Villains in the film, 4! The main one, Sandman played by Thomas Hayden Church seemed to do nothing but be used as a desperate attempt to fill up the middle segment of the film. When the policeman in charge of the Ben Parker murder case announces to Aunt May, "This is your husbands real killer." Holding up a picture of the Sandman, it all goes downhill. With the hundreds of Spiderman comics around, why did they have to choose such a cheesy and clichéd character as one of the villains. Topher Grace plays Venom, the second man villain, on a vendetta against spiderman after he humiliates him by stealing his girlfriend. Now this villain would have been fine, if he hadn't turned up 10 minutes towards the end of the movie as if it was just to add more confusion to the weak and pointless plot. As for the other two villains, James Franco as the new goblin does a great job for the start of the movie, but loses this when he's clonked on the head by a beam. And as for the other villain it's Spiderman himself, which makes the plot even more ridiculous.
This leads me to the next Major problem with this film, Spiderman's emotional development, He spends more time crying in the film than fighting bad guys. When he's black spiderman, it's even worse, he try's to pick up chicks and be a macho man, I didn't know whether or not it was meant to be serious or for comic relief. Did anyone remember to remove his comb over when he was chatting up chicks?
The worst part of the film was the dreadful jazz bar scene reminiscent to the jazz flute scene in Anchorman. Taking ideas for a serious film off a pathetic and immature comedy has to be the worst decision made by a writer I have ever seen.
By now you are probably bored of reading my criticism of such a mediocre film, but I have to admit the last battle was very cool indeed with amazing digital effects. The action was brilliant until Harry gets killed. Then somehow Spiderman kills Venom with the most pathetic plot coincidence in movie history. You'll have to watch it to find out, it is too dreadful to explain.
Then suddenly Sandman goes from being bad to good and pours his heart out to Spiderman. They talk about how they've done bad things in their lives and need to be open about them and move on. Whats next, a superheroes anonymous meeting in Spiderman 4 (Which will undoubtedly be made, the producers would not be stupid enough to not cash in on the success of the franchise without making another one).
As for the middle section of the film, well nothing really happens, which was another huge disappointment, this doesn't actually feel like a super hero film, it's more about Praker's personal development.
To sum up, I had reasonably high expectations when seeing this film after the hype of it from friends, but I was very disappointed. There were some very good parts, such as the end credits, to the film, but not enough for the value of a $10 movie ticket.