Spider Man 3 is not the best movie ever...but it's still pretty darn good

The opening of the first Spider Man movie was like a trip to middle-school heaven. I religiously read, collected, and re-read Spider Man comics books until about my freshman year in high school. You remember those specialty pictures you could get? The ones where you could bring your own props and they would snap your photo.?My friends and I brought our favorite comic books and forever provided evidence for how nerdy we truly were. (In my case, my middle-school mustache had already secured that status....yeah....I was that guy.) So when the original Spider Man came out, I immediately reverted back to about 5th grade standing in Kroger's (a grocery store) reading as many comics as I could before my mom came and told me it was time to go home. Needless to say, every following Spider Man movie has been pee-in-the-pants-go-on-the-first-day-status.

With that said, Spider Man 3 was not pee-in-the-pants good. That's not to say I didn't almost pee my pants a couple times. The fight sequences are ridiculous and Sandman looks incredibly real (even if his "origin" was a bit rushed). Venom looks amazing and the last four-way fight scene is UNBELIEVABLE.

But in the words of a the wise man I went to see it with (Billy Lawson if you're keeping score), the movie was kind of like Golden Corral: way too much stuff piled together so you really can't enjoy anyindividual thing and, when you leave, you're wishing you had more of a little of everything, but you only have so much room in your stomach.

This movie is about three movies rolled into one. Sandman, who pops up and then is left hanging until the end of the film, deserves his own movie. Topher Grace's Eddie Brock / Venom, who steals every scene he is in, deserves his own movie. I would have particularly been interested in the way Eddie is developed as a "dark mirror" of Peter. An amazing film could have been done on the whole dynamic between Peter / Eddie and Spidey / Venom. Finally, Harry and Peter, and there on-again-off-again relationship, would have been extremely high quality. How often is a heroes' identity known by their archrival? While I appreciate the well-roundedness of each of the characters, all of the backstory leaves just enough room to squeeze in only a few fights - though they are RIDICULOUSLY amazing.

The movie also get preachy more than a few times. While I have enjoyed the messages of the previous Spider Man films, this one tends to get heavy handed at times and generally assumes a lack of intelligence on the average audience. (In the midst of one fight scene, the movie cuts to a news reporter breathlessly telling us "this may be the end of Spider Man"...uh...really?)

This is one of those films that you should definitely see in the theaters - pay the extra bucks to get the full effect of the audio and visual feast. It is not a bad movie - just one that seems to suffer from "threequel" syndrome and too many quality plotlines that ultimately leave no room for any of them to be properly fleshed out.