While Spiderman 3 has taken a bit of a drubbing from reviewers, it can be best summed up as "OK with glimmers of cool." The weird thing is that the cool bits generally have very little to do with the estimated $350 million price tag of the film. Little set pieces involving Tobey Maguire swaggering like a fool down Manhattan streets and Bruce Campbell playing a snooty french maitre'd are way more fun than the action sequences. All the much-touted sand effects, though impressive, don't really amount to much, and neither does Venom's malevolent glop.
The main problem with Spiderman 3 is that not only is it villain-heavy, none of the villains hold a candle to Willem Dafoe as the Green Goblin or Alfred Molina as Doc Ock. One of the key strengths of the Spiderman series, besides an appealing lead character, has been well thought out villains, and Thomas Hayden Church and Topher Grace are both good but not great.
And there's also a lack of an "ooomph" moment, like the end of the first film where Spiderman finally shows his stuff with some sustained webslinging through New York's skyscrapers, or the subway scene in Spidey 2 where the wallcrawler is carried to safety by subway passengers.
Still, for all my complaining it's still a more entertaining and coherent film than some of the dreck headed our way this summer. And it was cool to be able to pick out locations I'd walked through not two months prior, especially in the sequences filmed in Times Square. Also, Stan Lee has a cameo and utters a classic Stan Lee-ism. I rate it...torrentable!
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