It just rolled over and died at the end

Rating: 2/10 (21 December 2007)

I am at a loss for words after seeing this mess. I was expecting a dramatic ending to the spider man trilogy, not this inexcusably flawed piece of crap! For the first quarter of the movie it was fairly decent. We got plenty of action and it looked quite pretty. But then the movie decided "I don't wanna be an action movie any more. I'm gonna be a drama!" The movie then tries to take two very different plots and twine them together. The first is Peter finding out that it was actually the Sandman who killed Uncle Ben and becomes obsessed with revenge. This is in stark contrast to the Sandman's back story in which he is just trying to provide a decent life for his little girl who is stuck living in the projects.
The other sub-par sub-plot is Peter Parker being twisted by the alien symbiot that has bonded itself to him. In the comics that was actually a pretty good story run as it steadily made spider man meaner and more aggressive. On the big screen it just turns Peter Parker into a creepy pervert who has no problem using his landlord's daughter who has a major crush on him, hitting on random girls on the street (they looked as creeped at as I was by this behavior), and shamelessly flirting with another mans girlfriend in front of M.J. just to make her jealous.
Probably the biggest let down of this movie was Venom. I found nothing wrong with the character himself. He still looked good (sans rolling tongue) and Topher Grace actually did a pretty good job of pulling the character off. But why give such a highly anticipated character less than fifteen minutes of screen time?! Why?! Soon, (but not soon enough it felt like) the movie came to its end in which Peter reconciles with the man who killed his uncle as well as Harry Osborne who repents of his vengeful ways. It was this so-sugary-your-pancreas-will-go-into-shock ending that irritated me the most. It was not just anticlimactic, it was the end of a great movie franchise rolling over and dying without so much as a whimper.
All in all this movie tanked. Toby McGuire still gives a rather wooden performance as our favorite web-slinging wall-crawler (I am still convinced Topher Grace should have been cast from the beginning as our main hero). And what little action there is is badly overshadowed by what are quite possibly the most poorly written script and story line for an action movie ever.