May. 14 - I disagree with some your choices but I do not wish you specific bodily harm, Sam Raimi
Yes, it might be suitable to subtitle Spider-Man 3 with something like "Every Which Way But Pudding" or "Dinosarmageddon," but I will purport that it's not that bad. However, it is still an action movie that I yelled at. The action scenes are good and the special effects are not notch which make the movie watch-able and, dare I say, even enjoyable. That said, making fun of a movie is much more entertaining than praising it so I'll get right to it.
The movie tries to do too much. Namely, it tries to put Sandman into more than zero frames of film. Sandman is a lame villain with a lame in-movie origin. Scientists are experimenting on sand. Clearly technological singularity will be brought about by exploring the silicon-oxygen bond via electrocuting sand with a tuning fork (This is when science didn't have to have any specific purpose). The experiment is being carried out at night and even though they have equipment to sense changes in the mass of sand being experimented on, their budget evidently did not include room for the high-tech equipment (such as a video camera or a window) to actually watch the experiment or to see that, no, a 200 lbs bird did not just land in your sandbox, it was, in fact, a beefy-faced man wearing the clearance rack from Gap.
So now Sandman can control sand. But instead of living a life of getting under peoples' contact lenses, ruining the potato salad at beach picnic and enjoying a lucrative partnership with the world's ant farm manufacturers as would more befit his powers, Sandman finds himself battling Spider-Man (and not over the perfect beach volleyball spot). Despite doing his best impersonation of The Mummy, Sandman leaves, defeated, by exploiting one of sand's more well-known properties: flight.
Joining Sandman in his unconvincing battle against Spider-Man is a disastrously-characterized Venom. I don't have anything against Topher Grace (except perhaps the obvious name thing) but he cannot get away from the fact that he is Eric Foreman. This translates into a Venom that seems scrawnier than Spider-Man himself and completely devoid of menace (phantom or otherwise).
Apart from that and Mary Jane being a nagging bitch throughout the entire movie, and the Osborn's butler's (who I think should be credited as D.E. Machina) Al Gore-like performance choice, and the strange choice of editing equipment, Spider-Man 3 is a decent movie.
Posted by Nathan
