Spider-man 3

I have an easier time with a movie that's just no good than I do with a movie that could be great, does a lot of things well, but shoots itself in the foot with its own stupidity. Before I continue, I should say that I was lukewarm on the first two installments in the Spider-man series, so fans of those should ignore me and go see this, because a lot of my frustration extends from the first two.

Several things bothered me. First, I've never liked Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker. Most of the time, he has a goofy grin on his face that I find irritating, but when he plays a scene where he has to cry, rather than looking emotional he has an "ouch, stop it" look like someone's got a tight grip on his nads. Second, I've been reading WWTDD (which is sometimes work-unsafe) for about a year, and now I can't stop staring at Kirsten Dunst's teeth. Third, and most importantly, this one went for a lot of easy jokes. There's an extended sequence in the middle where I thought the tone of the entire movie was derailed for cheap laughs. It seemed to work, as most of the theater was laughing the whole way through, but I felt like it was one of the dumbest sequences I've seen in a big budget movie.

And the flaws don't end there... some more specific, slightly spoilerish gripes, and a few positive things after the jump:

The Sandman makes for cool special effects, but the Flint Marko character was an extrageneric villain with a heart. The movie clocked in at 140 minutes which is a bit too long, and since they had three major villains, they really could've cut the Sandman entirely. The Stan Lee cameo was dreadful, and Sam Raimi threw in a cameo of his kids in one of the climactic moments which was distracting (I'm sure they're great kids, but they're not actors). Harry's butler gets a lot more screen time and his dialogue is cringeworthy and his performance not much better. There's an action sequence involving a damsel in distress and a giant disaster waiting to happen, but after Spider-man shows up and saves the girl, he never does anything to stop the disaster and they just ignore it. Plus, during that sequence, there's a shot of Gwen Stacy running towards the camera as the floor starts to collapse, and the effects are terrible. It's only one shot for about a second and a half, but you'd think that for $250 million, they could make it look a little better. Also, Kirsten Dunst apparently did her own singing, but they pre-recorded it and had her poorly lip sync to herself early on, which was weird.

As for the good, the action sequences, as usual, were mostly well done, and they have a lot of fun with the web slinging. The venom suit looked just how I'd imagine it, the sandman scenes were pretty cool, Bryce Dallas Howard and Topher Grace were both nice additions to the cast, and Bruce Campbell got a bigger part than the past two movies and did an excellent job with it.

As I said, fans of the first two should just go see this (not that they needed me to tell them to). I suspect they won't like it as much, but if you liked Tobey Maguire as Peter, it's not a bad movie at all, and if you also dig the more ridiculous comedy elements they go for in the middle, you might even love it. But for me, it was a few fun action scenes surrounded by stuff that I generally found boring.