Another average comic book adaption

Rating: 6/10 (21 May 2007)

Being a former avid comic book collector when I was younger, it pains me to see how Hollywood has been treating comic adaptations of late. There seems to be a bit of a pattern developing where movie makers seem to either try to fit too much into the time and end up not exploring any one topic or character well enough for you to care about the events presented, or else focus almost completely on the action to the detriment of story and character exploration so once again you don't care about the outcome.
Some comic book movies DO manage to escape fully slipping into one or both of these categories eg. good characterisation and reasonable exploration of only a few core concepts in the X-men movies; and good characterisation in The Hulk - which only just manages to win out over the confused addition of an extra villain late in the game. Both of these however might have also seemed better due to the higher class of acting ability? I haven't decided yet.
In any case, Spiderman 3 unfortunately seems to have a mix of both patterns and as such just didn't do it for me.
Being that the Spiderman movies are about a single character, I would expect that character to be fleshed out well. X-men, as I mentioned, manages to explore a number of characters reasonably well, but as the Spiderman trilogy has progressed I feel that Peter Parker has become more wooden and prone to posturing about spouting lame catch cries mixed with out of character moments thrown in to advance the plot quickly (eg Gwen Stacey related events). I ceased to feel for his character and ended up getting irritated that he was whining all the time about how badly he had screwed up. In fact, he was either arrogant and pompous, taking himself too seriously, or a bit childish and whiny... All in all I ended up bored.
The treatment of Peter Parker's character mirrored the style of the movie itself - it alternated between taking itself way too seriously with preachy speeches backed by music possibly intended to be inspirational, with American flags waving in the background :/ to weird scenes of the characters behaving in stupid ways (Peter Parker's dancing in the streets bit). All in all I could never tell if I was supposed to feel sorry for a character, hate them, like them, laugh at them or just not bother with in any of these. In the end that is the one I chose as it provided less confusion.
I think my main problem with the movie, and with most comic adaptations that have been executed poorly (Daredevil *shudders*) is that I recognise the *potential* there was for a decent movie (given all the provided back stories) that was squandered by poorly written scripts/dialogue/plot. Given the potentially interesting nature of Venom and his origins, I wasn't quite sure why they had bothered including Sandman in the movie at all - it would have been much more coherent if Venom was the sole new character and had been given the attention he deserved. The unfortunate casting of Topher Grace (that 70s Show) in the role of Eddie Brock/Venom was another distraction that completely killed interest in the character for me.
Anyway, the special effects were great as you might expect (the only reason I just managed to give this a 6/10), but the rest of the movie ended up so infuriating in parts that around 10 or 15 in a cinema of 300 walked out before the end. On my way out I heard murmurings from almost half the people I passed about how "lame" it was. I ended up apologising to my partner for even dragging her to see it. Maybe go see it if you're a fan, but be ready for some major disappointment. If I was able to get my money back at the end of the movie as a way of showing Hollywood studios that they are starting to get comic book movies WRONG I would. Now I'm not even sure if I should bother with the next Fantastic 4  Jessica Alba or not! :(