Entertaining enough, but far too long

Rating: Null/10 (7 May 2007)

The third in the popular Spider-Man trilogy suffers from the law of diminishing returns. The universe introduced and expanded upon in the first two movies is not as fully fleshed out, nor are the characters (old and new) that we meet throughout the story.
Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) is about to propose to his life-long love Mary-Jane (Kirsten Dunst) but, as his alter-ego Spider-Man, has to first contend with three villains: his best mate Harry Osborn (James Franco) has assumed the identity of the New Goblin in an attempt to avenge his father's death at the hands of Spider-Man; his uncle's killer Flint Markoff (Thomas Haden Church) is on the loose, and after a bizarre genetic accident is transformed into the terrifying Sandman; plus a strange otherworldly toxic substance that takes over Peter's Spider-suit and brings out his darker side. As Peter Parker, he must compete with a rival photographer at the Daily Bugle Eddie Brock (Topher Grace) as well as Gwen Stacy (Bryce Dallas Howard), a supermodel who fights it out with Mary-Jane for his affections...
The over-loading of characters into the plot means none of them are explored in any great depth. This is a bizarre anomaly given the length of the picture, which clocks in at well over two hours. This means the movie is far, far too long and the audience I saw it with with almost certainly getting bored with many actually leaving the cinema before the picture had finished.
That said the action sequences are exciting enough and the humour, for the most part, is well judged (I would, however, have edited out that irritating British female reporter at the climax). The best action scenes see a fight between Spider-Man and Sandman in the sewers of New York City, Spider-Man's rescue of Gwen from falling off a building, and the climax set in a high-rise construction site.
Maguire fares well enough as Spider-Man but there is little more he or Kirsten Dunst as Mary-Jane can do with their roles. Franco seems to enjoy himself as his character comes full circle and the ever-delightful J.K Simmons provides much of the laughs as J.Jonah Jameson. Willem Dafoe makes a brief but terrifying return as Norman Osborn, but none of the other actors are given a proper chance to develop their roles and their presence, as a result, is somewhat flat.
After watching this well-intentioned but inevitable tired effort, I couldn't believe that Sony are already commissioning three more Spider-Man movies. There is certainly a market for them, judging from the box office, but I wouldn't bank on any of them being an improvement on what's gone before.