Caught in a tangled web

I got to see the long-awaited “Spider-Man 3” last night. Although I won’t say it was a bad movie, I have to admit I was a little disappointed.

Regular readers will recall I’ve been expressing some reservations about this movie for quite some time. I was hoping I’d be wrong. Oh well.

There’s just too much in this movie. It’s got three classic villains from the comic books. Any one of them could have carried the movie on their own as the single main bad guy. But instead they all get short changed to a degree—especially Venom. He’s one of the all-time top Spider-Man bad guys and yet he barely got any of the screen time he deserved.

And as if the three bad guys (Sandman and the second Green Goblin being the other two) weren’t enough, they also cram in Gwen Stacey (and her police captain father).

I also didn’t care for parts of the “Dark Peter Parker” storyline. This was a deviation from the way the story of Spidey’s black, alien costume was handled in the comics. To me, it was reminiscent of the mid-1990s, around the time I stopped collecting comics, when storylines at the time resulted in the Spidey books becoming much too dark for their own good. The fun was sucked right out of Spider-Man then, and that’s what happened again in this movie.

Like I said, it wasn’t all bad. There were still some moments I liked and some parts that were fun. But overall this movie just tried too hard.

I loved the first two movies so much and was optimistic director Sam Raimi knew what he was doing and would pull this one off. Now I hope whoever does the inevitable “Spider-Man 4” takes a less is more approach delivers a much simpler story. I’m going to start the campaign now for the Lizard as the next featured villain.

SIDE NOTE: That shot above reminds me a lot of the cover of "Web of Spider-man #1." I wonder if that was intentional? If so, then well done. I always loved that cover.