I'm done with this franchise.

Rating: 2/10 (11 May 2007)

I feel since I just wasted two and half hours of my life watching this movie, that I'm now entitled to use a over-used cliché to describe the biggest disappointment of a film I've ever seen. "Oh, what a tangled web they weaved".
This movie was the biggest car wreck of a movie I've been to since "Battlefield Earth". But at least I expected that to suck. I was a huge fan of the previous two entries in the Spider-Man franchise. They were very enjoyable and they stayed true to their source material. This movie made it all up as they went along and showed just enough hints of greatness to keep me saying to myself right up until the end "any minute now, this movie will be awesome". It never was.
One word sums it up. Overkill. Two many characters (some of them completely needless) and two many plots. All throughout the film there were scenes that would have been great in another version of the story, just not this one. The movie felt like they took three stories and slammed them together to get the final product. Everything felt rushed, even though the movie ran way too long. It was full of cheap "huh?!" plot devices. The comedy was anything but comedy (outside of Bruce Cambell's turn as a John Cleese-like french waiter) and was frankly, embarrassing. Spider-Man's much hyped desent into the "dark side" was just Peter Parker getting emo hair and not showering, and the normally interesting relationship between Spidey and MJ felt like slow, dull torture.
Thomas Hayden Church's performance as the Sandman was great, and he was clearly the most interesting character in the film both visually, and character wise, but he was swallowed up by this monster of a film. By the end, I didn't even see a need for him to be in the story at all. He turned out just to be a plot device to rehash a storyline from the first film that was already settled before Spider-Man 2.
And Venom! I had waited 15 years to see Venom, the greatest Spider-Man villain of all time, rendered onto the movie screen. The skinny kid with the big Adam's Apple from "That 70s Show" was Venom for maybe only the last 30 minutes of the film, and they didn't even mention he WAS Venom during the movie. Everyone just called him "that other spider-man!" after the film. And the continuity was so bad, no one bothered to explain why Topher Grey's character got horrible rat teeth once he became "that other Spider-Man". Even Toby's chompers stayed pearly white when he went all emo after wearing the black costume.
Fans of the comics will dislike this movie because they basically molested the source material (I.E. the Spider-Man comics this franchise was once so faithful to) to get all these pieces to fit together.
Causual fans (I.E. people who only really know about Spidey from the films) will dislike this movie because its just way too much for one film to handle.
The only people who'll truly like this movie are CGI junkies. The special effects and the fight scenes are the ONLY arena this film excelled in.
Don't waste your money at theaters, unless your a total fan-boy. See it on DVD only if you MUST. Watching it for free on television is what I recommend.
What a turkey.