A strong finish, although there are several flaws.

Rating: 9/10 (6 May 2007)

Various reviews have mentioned the butler scene, which totally took me out of the film. However, perhaps even bigger than the problem of where this guy was while Harry wasted years on a mission of vengeance, a more fundamental problem is: what exactly does his testimony actually prove? So Osborne was impaled by his own glider; that doesn't mean anything; later on, Harry is impaled by his own glider; did Harry kill himself? Aside from the butler, most of this movie works quite well; the parts that don't basically all involve the Sandman, who is quite well-acted, but totally unnecessary. The retcon with Uncle Ben just sticks out as unnecessary. The ending is just weird; sure, he's repentant, but he's probably put four-score people in critical care, and caused millions of dollars in property damage (of course, perhaps Spidey just didn't have the energy to stop him at that point). Sandman should have been left out in favour of Harry and Venom. The Sandman's whole plot (criminal, sick daughter, superpowers) reminded me more of Scott Lang than anything else, although Lang became a hero (albeit by stealing).
Pretty much everything else works great. James Franco is excellent; he was rather awkward in the previous two.
One of the things that I really liked was the large, large cast of characters; to have Connors drop in for the film equivalent of two panels, and Captain Stacy, and the whole Bugle cast, etc., just is terrific for replicating the feel of a comic, where appearances of characters cost nothing.
The "emo-Spidey" scenes are played outrageously broadly, which I think is the point: it's goofy, laughable, until the ending scuffle, at which point the movie crashes down to earth. I really liked how it was handled. It's amusing how they cast natural blonde Dunst as redhead MJ, and then hired natural redhead Howard as blonde Gwen.
Eddie Brock is handled very well; although I'm not sure how the movie wants us to feel about his firing from the Bugle; sure, Peter was a bit of a jerk, but professionally speaking he did absolutely the right thing: Brock falsified, and he deserved to go down (not to mention smearing Spider-Man's reputation for no reason).
The ending is quite appropriate; I was afraid they'd have him propose or something like that, but instead we just get a ray of hope that they can work things out.
In the end, it's a tremendously ambitious film; it falls down in a couple of places, but I'll give it a 9/10. It was very entertaining.