Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 63% (Critics) / 54% (Audience)
Directed By: Sam Raimi
Written By: Sam Raimi, Ivan Raimi and Alvin Sargent
Starring: Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Thomas Haden Church and Topher Grace
Studio: Sony Pictures

Synopsis: In the third installment of the franchise Spiderman faces a three-pronged assault from a new Green Goblin, The Sandman and the alien symbiotic Venom while Peter Parker’s personal life goes through an almost equal upheaval.

The Good:
The action sequence between Peter Parker and Green Goblin Jr was phenomenal; the effects for the Sandman were top notch; Tobey Maguire was really good as regular old Pete and even better as symbiote-corrupted Peter; Peter’s Saturday Night fever stroll was hysterical; Topher Grace played weaselly like it was second nature to him.

The Bad:
The Sandman and Venom plots never felt fully fleshed out. Sandman looked forlorn and stared at a locket of his daughter constantly yet nothing ever came of any of it. Despite Topher Grace being a hoot as Eddie Brock his transformation into Venom and subsequent leap into comic book villainy seemed to happen in two seconds flat.
This film also would have benefited greatly from having one of the villains completely written out of the script.
And what’s with the Osborn butler all of a sudden sharing a major bit of info with Harry so late in the game? He didn’t think that Harry could have used that nugget before he descended into stock super-villainy?
Gwen Stacy was a totally useless character. Spiderman doing a song and dance number was uber cheesy.

The Ugly:
Three words…Kirsten Dunst singing.

Final Verdict: This film suffered from a bad combination of villain overload and director Raimi’s mind boggling descent into comic book cheesiness. Those two things took what had been up to this film a very promising franchise and basically brought it to a halt causing Sony to scrap this version of the character and reboot the entire thing. C+