Well. That one was all over the map, wasn’t it?
I liked it. It wasn’t really a very good movie, but I liked it anyway. At 2.5 hours’ running time or whatever, the decent bits added up to the equivalent of a reasonably entertaining short film, albeit chopped up and edited randomly into several other similar yet not-so-entertaining films. Kind of the cinematic equivalent of channel-surfing; it left me with that same sort of disjointed feeling.
Thoughts:
As with the character of Dr. Octopus, I was deeply impressed with how they were able to make the Sandman work so well as a plausibly intimidating onscreen villain. I also liked the fundamentally awkward way in which he uses his abilities at first, which makes a lot of sense-- after all, he’s made of sand. It’s neither an intuitive nor particularly elegant medium for supervillainy.
‘Venom’ worked pretty well, too, although I thought the amorphous crawling pseudopod-oozing symbiote was way more intimidating on its own. But I’ve always been of the opinion that the character is kind of stupid-looking anyway. Oooooh, it’s Spider-Man, except with a big goofy fang-filled mouth! Skeewy. They never actually got around to giving him the name ‘Venom’ in the film though, did they? I would have enjoyed hearing Ted Raimi’s naming suggestions.
Speaking of the Venom symbiote, I think the scriptwriters deserve some kind of recognition for providing an origin even less plausible than in the original comic. “You know, what with everything else going on in the film, we don’t really have the time to develop a backstory for this thing… oh, what the hell, let’s just drop it on him.”
I note that New York City continues its proud tradition of conducting incredibly dangerous scientific research in easily accessible areas without any safety protocols whatsoever. Clearly they learned their lesson from the last movie about the dangers of housing fusion reactors in Manhattan brownstones, as the matter-disintegrator array in this film is safely located behind a modest fence in the middle of a vacant lot. Did they ever even say what they were trying to achieve with that experiment, anyway? Was there any kind of goal, or were they just disintegrating sand for no reason?
Three movies in, and I still remain stubbornly unconvinced by Sam Raimi’s continued assertion that Kirsten Dunst is the modern cinematic ideal of feminine beauty. Oh, she’s fine-looking, but in a “say, that new bank teller is pretty cute” kind of way, not as a New York fashion model/actress. Regardless, I find her nasolabial grooves endearing.
This movie started to come off the rails for me right around the point where the detective walks up to the New York City Chief of Police and goes, “Remember the Parker murder case from two years ago?”
How the heck did the Green Goblin ever manage to keep his “thermal detonator” pumpkin bombs sorted separately from his “total disintegration” pumpkin bombs? It seems like it would be really easy to confuse the two.
Did I miss a scene, or did the entire subplot about Sandman’s daughter and her nonspecific terminal illness just never get resolved at all?
Did I miss a scene, or did Spider-Man never actually get around to stopping that runaway crane?
Venom: “Um… hey, Sandman… I thought we agreed that you were going to hang the hostage’s cab up in my web to lure Spider-Man. Why is there a dump truck up there instead?”
Sandman: “Ah, crap… Look, I got confused, what do you want from me? My eyes and brain are made of SAND!”
Butlers have a very strange code of professional conduct.