While billed as an action movie, director Sam Raimi and the screenwriters were obsessed with teasing the love story between MJ and Peter. Yes, it is necessary to tell, but it soon came to the point where I was indifferent to what happened to them. Yet, one look at Spider-Man shooting webs at buildings and flying right past them will have you hooked.

That's what I wrote here 3 years ago following the release of Spider-Man 2. The third installment suffers from the same problem of trying to balance a love story with the action elements. However, this time around, the audience loses. The indifference lingers as Peter and MJ's relationship is complicated by an amnesiac Harry and a new girl in Bryce Dallas Howard (who looks stunning by the way...in all her other movies, she's been really plain). With two villains to focus on (Venom and the Sandman), their on-screen presence is fairly limited as we follow Peter Parker and his road into darkness, portraying some sort of Jared Leto/Chris Gaines hybrid. What remains is an up-and-down picture trying to tell multiple stories of multiple characters and not doing a very good job of it. As a result, its usual pillars are weakened; the action scenes and fights are more cartoonish and not particularly convincing and the humor at times seems forced. At 140 minutes, your time may be better spent waiting for this DVD to come out.