Could have been much better....

Rating: 8/10 (8 May 2007)

I will go ahead and say this so people will understand why I didn't give this movie a lower grade: I love Spider-Man. I watched nearly the entire animated series when they first came out. However it pains me to see the third installment of this series fall flat under the two previous parts. Spider-Man was good, Spider-Man 2 was great, Spider-Man 3... could have been greater. First big mistake on the part of director Sam Raimi along with Ivan Raimi and the other people who wrote the screenplay was the fact that they tried to squeeze in 2 times more villains than the previous parts put together. Of course, if the movie would have had an epic time length of 4 hours this decision would have been fairly justified. Even more weird is the fact that even though we had this many villains and would have expected an even more action packed movie than the other two, Sam Raimi wanted to make room for tear-jerking, heart-breaking, pity-inspiring drama... he failed miserably.
Why? It's not because of the over-exaggeration or the uncalled for soap-opera moments and not even the fact that some things just don't make all that much sense (like Spider-man kissing Gwen in front of his girlfriend as if just wanting to start a conflict, and his even cooler punch line "She's just a girl from my class" instead of just saying something like "I did it for the cameras") but because of one man: Tobey Maguire. I really appreciate him as an actor and i think he did a great job of playing Spider-Man, but i'll just go ahead and say this: he has 0 dramatic value in the scenes in which he is put. I mean seriously, upon seeing his face when he started crying i couldn't help but laugh. I figured at first that i might be a raving lunatic for transforming such "dramatic" scenes into jokes. That is until people in 3 different cinemas (yes i have seen it 3 times) all laughed at the same scenes. Case closed.
On the good side, the visual effects were just candy for the retina and i just couldn't help but almost drool at the sight of the battles and the sheer brutality of certain hits (speaking of which Harry Osbourne has a weird habit of just slamming his head into any hard object he can see right?). This was an aspect that made me pass over the drama and tear-jerking (tears of laughter) scenes only to expect another clash of titans. As a conclusion I recommend you go watch this movie with several friends so as to just have a good laugh when seeing Spider-Man cry his blue and red heart out at the thought that Mary Jane is going to dump him.
Oh, one more thing. Although i don't appreciate the fact that director Sam Raimi brutally slaughtered the image of Spider-Man when he was wearing the suit by turning him into some crazed 70's disco fanatic, i have to admit it was funny as hell. However, i don't want to see a superhero turned into something like "that" any time soon. :D