Not impressed and neither was most of the audience *SPOILERS*

Rating: 5/10 (4 May 2007)

I saw it at the 11:59 pm Thursday May 3rd showing at a local cinema. I have been waiting for this film for years and was psyched about Venom and seeing them explore Spidey's dark side. However, the more I think about it, the more I was let down.
Spider-man 2 blew my socks off. I went back and saw it several times in the cinema. The latest installment however...
What worked for S2-character driven plot-line. While S3 was too somewhat, I didn't care for them this time around. Had they focused solely on Venom or Sandman it would have been much better. We saw Doc Ock as a man who was in love, someone you could be friends with. We saw the tragic death of his wife and his slow decent into 'madness'. They tried to do that with Marko but failed. So when he creeps up into the little girl's room I was thinking 'oh god, not in a kid's room, are you crazy?' Then he looks at her. He could be a pedophile for all I know. Only later do we learn he is her father. If we had been shown some time he spent in jail, reading letters from her, humanising him more, maybe then I would have felt bad for him and sympathised. All we see of Marko is him for 2 minutes as a man, the rest of the time he is a pile of sand. Yay. How am I supposed to feel anything for some sand?
Now Venom... love Venom, great bad guy. Visually I think they did a great job, but there wasn't enough time spent showing him vs. Spidey. Venom's powers are at least twice that of Spider-mans, but we never get to see that. We're never really told or shown how his webbing is stronger, that HE is stronger. They really should have spent more time showing the evolution of Brock and his build-up of animosity towards Parker. Instead, what do we see? He begs Peter not to ruin his career then two seconds later he's at the church asking God to kill him.
Oh, and don't even get me started on Black Spidey. OK, I totally get what they were trying to do with Peter's new hair, but somehow it was uncomfortable. So much so that whenever he would appear on screen with that hair, half the cinema audience would laugh. It just didn't work. And in the beginning, we immediately see Peter not as we knew him, but self- absorbed. Where's the Peter we knew from the last movie? That's the Peter I wanted to see and didn't see until the very end where he forgives Marko. They should have kept him like that until he first learned of Marko killing Ben, then let his dark side emerge, not before. Before that moment there was no reason for the symbiote to be attracted to him, because it's attracted to aggression. When it latched onto Pete's bike in the park, there was no aggression there!
All in all, there was just too much going on. Too many plot lines, too many subplots. They did well with Harry and Jameson of course. Bruce Campbell's part was fantastic as always. Mary Jane wasn't bad either. Will I buy it when it comes out on DVD? Probably, but I doubt I'll pay $8 to see in in the theatre again.