Missing the level it could have pretty easily reached

Rating: Null/10 (18 November 2010)

This movie can be an entertaining one regardless of it strongly missing its full potential. There is a lot to nitpick and the overall quality compared to the first two is highly inferior. Still, it can be enjoyed when just trying to watch it as a movie and not a book of knowledge.
What went wrong with Spiderman 3? For me, one problem was that the film makers weren't that deep with this one. They clearly decided to take another approach. Of course, there was humor in the first two but it wasn't that forced. The level of comedy was just a little too great here. I think it would have worked better if they had had some seriousness and tried to utilize every single subtlety that there was to get. If you compare the elevator scene from Spiderman 2, for example, to the scene were Peter dances in the bar, you can see the difference. The humor in the second one was a balancer to the troubles Peter had in that one. In Spiderman 3, it affects the tone in total, making you think that this was not meant to be taken seriously at all. Still, in order to get its multiple messages across, you need to do so.
The second, and a lot more dominating, problem was the lack of faithfulness to the original material. My favorite villain in Spiderman franchise is Venom. I didn't know how they were going to write the symbiote into the movie. It feels like they were desperate and just decided to make a meteor drop next to Peter. Also, I didn't like the way Venom was portrayed. Sam Raimi clearly doubted the Venom-face being able to convey emotions and credibility so he decided to unmask Eddie during every single speech. I liked who they didn't make him look ridiculously muscular or big. The interesting thing in the symbiote-plus-human -concept is that the result is pure power regardless how strong the person was in the beginning. This way, we can relate to that concept better.
So, it is fare to say that this movie failed to use the potential of the villains and the overall mythology. If you want to have a deep story considering the characters, this is not a movie for you. Still, it was pretty well made visually and it didn't feel like they were just boasting one it.