My Regular Season Has Begun

I started my summer movie-watching spree with Spider-Man 3 last weekend and this week I followed up with 28 Weeks Later. I will do a review of both, but I am going to start with Spider-Man 3.

After reading some fan reviews on the World Wide Web in the last week it has been decided that folks either loved this movie or hated it. I fall closer to the latter.
Sam Raimi really disappoints this time around with too many villains, a ridiculous display of the emergence of Peter Parker/Spider-Man’s dark side, pointless characters and laughable ways of cleaning up the mess Raimi made in trying to spin too long and complicated of a web.
The Sandman is a pointless character that is pushed upon Parker (and the audience) by changing the Spider-Man comic book history. According to the movie, Flint Marko/Sandman has a connection to Uncle Ben’s killing, but Raimi only does this because otherwise there is nothing to Sandman. He has nothing to give to the movie except some cool visual effects, which aren’t anything we haven’t yet seen in a Spider-Man movie.
Another villain, who is considered to be Spider-Man’s most anticipated and wicked adversary, is Venom. Venom is the creation of a symbiote alien goo and photographer Eddie Brock. Brock is angry with Parker for ruining his career and the goo brings out more anger from Brock. Thus Venom is born… and dead within 12 minutes of screen time. This creature is what every Spider-Man fan has been waiting six years for since hearing the news of a live-action movie. What a let down.
The final villain (that’s right, we’re still working on villains) is the new Green Goblin, a.k.a. Harry Osborn. Osborn is still on a rampage to kill Spider-Man, whom he now knows is former best friend Parker. The two have the best fight scenes of the entire movie, but it results in a lame result that has no originality and teeters on being a bad soap opera story. Even the outcome of Parker and Osborn’s friendship is resolved by a random character that mimics the form of Bruce Wayne’s conscious. Again, not an original idea from Raimi.
A character who is set up to play a large part in the film but fizzles out halfway through is Gwen Stacy. This will be another argument by Spider-Man fans because Stacy was a much bigger player early in Parker’s life in the comic books. She is introduced at the beginning of the film and consequently drives a wedge between Parker and Mary Jane, but then is dropped completely after a pitiful attempt at humor by Raimi when the alien goo begins to take control of Parker’s dark side.
I’m not sure of the running time for Spider-Man 3, but it feels way too long for a kids’ comic book film, which is what this series has been reduced to after this installment. The story drags and the final battle is so complex/unrealistic it becomes farcical. Spider-Man 3 is the worst of the entire series and a change needs to take place because it just feels tiresome now.