Massive disappointment

Rating: 3/10 (5 May 2007)

It's got so much potential, but it just wastes it away. It throws in everything including the kitchen sink, trying to end the series on a high note, and it does not work at all. You've got Harry and Sandman and Venom and emo Peter and Gwen and MJ and it's all just thrown together, and very little of it sticks. Parts of it are good - pretty much the action sequences and the Venom stuff - but so much of it is incredibly laughable and borders on self-parody. I could go on and on with the stuff I found ridiculous, but I would take up an entire review with that, as there's just so much junk. I'll stick to the highlights.
The stuff that works is the entire church sequence - by far my favourite scene in the movie - and, to an extent, the action scenes. The final battle is quite cool with the four heroes/villains, but it's unfortunately punctuated by a terribly annoying newscaster + reporter explaining everything and Mary Jane screaming. The fights between Sandman and Spidey are very well done, and the Harry/Peter fight was pretty terrific. The Venom origin scene (in the church) is very cool and very dark and it works very well. But it's about the only perfect scene in the film. The rest is just bad, bad, bad.
The stuff that doesn't work is, well, everything else. Emo Peter doesn't even make sense, because, though he's got the emo hair, he doesn't act emo at all. He's like the cockiest jock at school with a terrible haircut. It makes no sense. Every single character, outside of Peter + MJ, disappears for like 20 minutes on end, and nobody notices! Gwen is brought up and then dropped, same with Marko, same with Brock, same with every other side character. It's extremely frustrating. Meanwhile, Harry gets amnesia (!) and a butler shows up out of nowhere to recap the last two movies (!!). Very random and very (unintentionally) hilarious.
The acting is almost uniformly terrible, with only Topher Grace occasionally impressing me. He was a hoot at times, but very meh at others. Still, he's better than Maguire (silly), Dunst (melodramatic), Franco (cheezy), Church (bland), and Howard (hot but not much else). Scenes which were supposed to be sad were instead laughable because of the terrible acting. It's truly painful to watch at times. The editing is simply atrocious - none of the scenes flow together, everything is jumbled up, it seemed like some scenes were missing and others were out of place. The effects are very stunning at times and rather not at others. And then the ending; to top it all off, we get multiple false endings! Just the cherry on top.
It's not a dreadful movie. It's got some good stuff in it, but it's overcome by the sheer weight of its lunacy. It's quite entertaining (if only for the unintentional hilarity) and rarely boring. The action scenes are top notch. But, as far as story and characters go, it's on the level of Batman + Robin. Really. A massive disappointment for me, and I'm not even a huge Spider-Man fan.