Disappointed is a mild word for my reaction to Spider-Man 3; I thought it was bad in more ways than I feel like enumerating fully, but some include character cheats, lousy timing, and horrendous attempts at what I can only presume to be comedy. Even Stan Lee and Bruce Campbell’s cameos fell completely flat, the latter doing a bad riff on The Pink Panther‘s Jacques Clouseau. There were a couple of higher points, but overall it gets a two-star meh
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(Matt’s a lot more forgiving than I am.)
Fortunately, Hot Fuzz made up for all of Spidey’s shortcomings. Although I’ve never been a fan of zombie movies I thought Shaun of the Dead was brilliant, and HF is almost its equal in the buddy-cop film genre. Simon Pegg’s parodic formula starts to show a bit, though—for example, he substitutes He-Man references for Shaun’s Star Wars lines—and I think a third along the same lines might be pushing it a bit. Still, I wonder if he’d be up for a superhero movie after Run, Fatboy, Run?
Oh I so agree with you on this one. I was very much looking forward to Spider-Man 3 because the other two had been a lot of fun but alas, this one went off the rails. Even more painful than Bruce Campbell was Tobey McGuire’s scenes where he supposed to be cocky and cool but over-the-top. Well, he went so over the top that Chris and I were simply embarassed to watch him. And then there was the scene where he pulls out the red/blue suit after having been infected by Venom for a while and it takes him so bloody long to put it on and the shmaltzy “inspiring” music is playing that I actually said out loud, “Oh just put the damn thing on already!” *sigh* Would’ve been much better at the drive in where you can cat call to your heart’s content without getting popcorn thrown at you or dirty looks!! Can’t wait to see Hot Fuzz though..
It appears I’m of pretty much the same opinion as Tammy: Spider-Man 3 was this franchise’s equivalent of Superman IV: The Quest For Peace. Even objectively (which I think is how I’ve evaluated it, since I don’t remember much of the first two films) I thought it was poorly paced, contained nonsensical plot developments and implausible action (even for a superhero movie), and contained way more than its share of embarrassingly-bad dialogue and “moments”. For the most part the secondary characters were little more than shells: I couldn’t care less about on-again off-again Harry, jealous Eddie, petulant MJ or Mr. “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way” Sandman.
I did like Bryce Howard’s contribution in the jazz club scene, and in a good movie it might have been enough to make it great. But it’s not enough to make me watch the rest of that scene again, let alone the rest of the movie.
‘Nuff said!
Did I tell you that I saw Hot Fuzz? Wasn’t sure at the start but by the end I thought the action was better than Spiderman for sure! For my money it was the best action sequence I’ve seen in multiple years!