At The Fleapit: Spider-Man 3

Spider-Man 3 is a classic example of the law of diminishing returns. While Spider-Man 2 was as good, if not better, than the genre-defining original, Spider-Man 3 is a lot of spectacle and powerful human drama peppered with some truly dire and heavy-handed amateur storytelling.

At 140 minute duration it's not only long, but it feels long - which is a far worse crime. A sadly mediocre conclusion to the trilogy, it is so packed with twist after twist, new characters and sub-plots that it smells like it was written by committee (each with a different idea of what the film's ultimate goal was). Perhaps this is how several of the most trite scenes in modern cinema managed to slip through the net: namely Eddie Brock going into the church for no good reason ... except it helped the plot; and Harry's butler suddenly deciding after two years to tell him that Spider-Man didn't kill his dad... again a 'nice' plot convenience.

And you would have thought with all the money being thrown at the screen for the wild CGI effects, a bit could have been siphoned off to make sure they got some half-decent supporting actors to back up the superb leads: just try and listen to the news reporter at the scene of Mary Jane's kidnapping without laughing at the awfulness of her delivery and try to watch the little kid with the camera fleecing JJ Jameson without wondering why her parents didn't stop her humilating herself in front of a global audience.

But for all this there are some great superpowered fights, Venom and Sandman make good villains (although both their origin stories lack the verisimilitude of those of Green Goblin and Doc Ock from the previous films), and the Peter-MJ-Gwen Stacy 'love' triangle is nicely handled. The symbiont suit turning Peter into a bit of a jerk is also very funny, and ultimately tragic, even if that segment was quite drawn out (we got the message, Sam!)

It seems like trailers for Spider-Man 3 were playing in cinemas ages ago, so you would have thought that given all that time, a director as consistently good as Sam Raimi could have hammered out the faults in his self-penned script.

As a big comic book geek with the "curse of knowledge", as Fred Hicks would call it, I know there are enough dangling plot threads (Captain Stacy, Dr Connors etc) for another film, but hopefully, if this gets made, as much care will taken this time over the script as the special effects.