Wherever There's a Hang-Up

I was really looking forward to Spider-Man 3. Sadly, it's something of a let-down.

Don't get me wrong, I didn't hate it. In fact, part of me really wishes it was truly offensively awful, in the vein of X-Men 3. But it's not. As far as big-budget action movies go, it's pretty decent. And I'll be damned if the special effects in it aren't some of the most impressive things I have ever seen on screen. But the story, as everyone else is saying (and as everyone had suspected as long as two years ago, when we learned that it would have not one, not two, but three supervillains in it) is just way too bloated. The script is fundamentally flawed.

It would likely have been ten times the movie it was if they had excised the Sandman plot entirely, and taken that screen time to develop the drama between Peter, Harry, and Eddie Brock. And besides that, a whole lot of the movie really suffers from a nasty case of having been co-written by the Raimi brothers. Alvin Sargent's script for the second film in the trilogy was a (relatively) subtle, nuanced character drama about young people in New York struggling with their identities. By the end of that movie, I really genuinely cared about those characters.

But this script? Ham-handed. Unsubtle. Unoriginal (Sick daughter? Amnesia? Seriously?!).

Eh. It's alright. See it if you want to. Just don't expect the miracle of the second one to happen again. When Spider-Man 2 ended, I had tears in my eyes. With the third one? Not so much.