Anthony Lane, who hates everything, hates Spider-Man 3. It's not like you won't see it anyway.

If “Spider-Man 3” is a shambles, that’s because it makes the rules up as it goes along. By the end, for instance, Sandman has become the size of an office block, each swinging fist as big as a truck, his personality reduced to brutishness. I half expected him to come after Spider-Man and Mary Jane carrying a gigantic bucket and spade. By what criterion did he grow so mountainous? Is he like a Transformer, or more like a genie? The fact is that if the fantastical is to flourish it must lay down the conditions of its magic and abide by them; otherwise, we feel cheated. (Tolkien knew this better than anyone.) Some viewers will take the New Goblin, whose name sounds like a small-circulation poetry magazine, to be a vessel of unnatural forces, while others will see him, when he fires up his rocket-powered skateboard, as a rich kid with too many toys. That’s the problem with this third installment of the franchise: not that it’s running out of ideas, or lifting them too slavishly from the original comic, but that it lunges at them with an infantile lack of grace, throwing money at one special effect after another and praying—or calculating—that some of them will fly.

That's my theory, anyway. I haven't seen any review so far that does justice to just how bad Spider-Man 3 is. (Anthony Lane, of course, comes closest. He's right: the Sandman's creation is just about the movie's only good scene.)

Most of the problem is with Raimi's script, not with his directing—though there are definitely some very odd choices on that front as well.

With too many characters to cram into the movie and too many special-effects sequences to navigate aimlessly between, Raimi has no choice but to turn to random coincidence over and over again to drive the engine of his plot. The result is a muddled and astoundingly dull disaster, certainly the worst major superhero movie since Batman & Robin, if not Superman III.

Keep your happy memories of Doc Ock and stay home.

$500 million dollars? That's ridiculous.

Who else but...Lowell from Wings?