Spider-Man 3

Here's how disappointing a filmgoing experience Spider-Man 3 was for the second time: no picture. This one deserves no visual aid for you. The question I have after the slog on Blu-ray is what justification anyone can provide for this awful, awful movie. It runs nearly 150 minutes long, has two action sequences set around a construction site, two musical numbers, and it just never seems to stop.

How do you justify this mess? Sam Raimi, he who created the two masterful previous Spider-Man films, chose to take what good he'd done and completely screw it up with this film. The end of the second movie left us with Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) and Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst) in love and knowing it, and Harry Osborne (James Franco) knowing that Peter was not only Spider-Man, but the man responsible for his father's death. So this film, obviously, screws up the Peter-Mary Jane relationship and throws Harry into a coma for one hour of the movie, so he can conveniently forget why he's got a bone to pick with his pal.

Moreover, every major plot of this film could take up its own movie. Instead of having Peter deal with his celebrity and Venom, the mysterious outer-space ooze, or just have Spidey fight the Sandman, or have Spidey just fight Hobgoblin, we get everything and we get nothing. There's nothing but rushing going on here, as Raimi rushes to give us bare-bones exposition on Flint Marko (a wasted Thomas Haden Church), the escaped convict, who-killed-Uncle-Ben-but-he's-good-really, who becomes Sandman; and Eddie Brock (Topher Grace), who apparently likes being angry despite never proving it until he becomes Venom, the slimy photographer in love with Gwen Stacey (Bryce Dallas Howard, proving very good in yet another piece of garbage). Oh, and then there's Mary Jane's Broadway career, Peter turning into a disco duck (seriously, who saw that dancing footage and thought it was a good idea?), and Bruce Campbell as a French waiter. OK, the French waiter bit is almost kind of funny, but the rest is awful.

And all that time on the script apparently meant no time for special effects. It's rare to see a big-budget action movie so blatantly ballsy about how fake it is. At no point does anything on the screen, with the exception of the Sandman, at times, look even remotely real. Yes, there's not a guy suited up as Spider-Man, swinging webs around New York City. But, there's a way to make me believe it in the movie. Especially on Blu-ray, this is a film that looks incredibly fake and is, in many more ways than one.

One star out of four