My Diseased Mind

Spiderman 3

First, a little background: I was a comic book geek. I spent a good portion of my prepubesence reading, pawing over, and coveting the tri-colored accounts of modern mythology. See, that’s totally what a comic book geek would say. For what it’s worth, I was also a baseball card geek and a Star Wars geek, but not a Star Trek geek. Not until college, at least. However, all that’s really germane to the topic at hand is that I loves me some Marvelly goodness. So when a superhero movie comes out, The Boy and I are there. We’ve watched them all, from the good (X-Men), to the great (Spiderman 2), to the horrific (Ghost Rider). Spiderman 3 was no exception.

As far as superhero movies go, Spiderman 3 was good, but not great. It had action, adventure, the obligatory romantic subplot, and climactic fight scenes. Some of the special effects were amazing. However, it also had some completely unnecessary scenes. Seriously, haven’t we seen proof enough that Spiderman dancing is not a good thing?

Also bad was the acting, the pacing, and the fact that there was just too much story to tell in too small a space of time.

In a superhero movie, there’s a lowering of expectations, acting wise. It’s not like we can expect Oscar-winning performances in a comic book movie. Ham-fisted dialog is almost a badge of honor. But with Kirsten Dunst spending a good portion of the movie looking like hell and some genuinely laugh-inducing crying scenes by Maguire, this one was subpar. After building up the back stories and characters for two movies, we cared about them, and they spent this entire movie tearing that down. The most sympathetic character in the movie was Sandman, by far. It’s a bad sign when the audience identifies more with a villain than the heroes.

The pacing issues became clear by the 2nd act. This move slowed to an absolute crawl in the middle. It was so bad that around 10% of the audience got up to go to the bathroom/concessions at the same time. For as much money as was spent on this film, I was really surprised at how many scenes just didn’t make any sense, how many major characters completely disappeared for long periods of time, and the large breaks in the action.

Ideally, this movie should have left out Venom or Sandman, holding them out for the next movie. Barring that, they could have completely done away with Emo Pete, added a couple of minor fights, introduced Venom a tad earlier, and had a much better movie. There was really no time to explore the origins of the new villains, or the full effects of the symbiote. All we really know for sure is that it turned Peter into a douchebag.

Overall, the movie was decent, but not great. I’m not sorry I saw it, but I’m in no hurry to see it again. 2.5 out of 5 stars.

The Boy’s take: It was good, but there was too much Peter Parker and not enough fighting.

Hey, the kid’s concise.