CinemaNow - Spider-Man 3

Spider-Man faces three villains in his new movie, but he's facing a lot more in the film section of your local newspaper. Critics, for the most part, have been relentless in their expressions of disappointment with Spider-Man 3. "One gets the sense of a mighty franchise in wheel-spinning mode," writes Gene Seymour in Newsday. "You'd like to think it's catching a second wind for an even mightier return. But you also wonder how much further it can go from here." Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal expresses his let down this way: "While it's too harsh to suggest that what was fresh has gone completely stale, the truth lies in between, as with day-old bread." And Manohla Dargis in the New York Times seems just plain ticked off that the producers didn't produce better. "Aesthetically and conceptually wrung out, fizzled rather than fizzy, this latest installment in the spider-bites-boy adventure story shoots high, swings low and every so often hits the sweet spot, but mostly just plods and plods along, as if its heart were pumping tired radioactive blood," she writes. Rick Groen asks in the Toronto Globe & Mail: "How did the franchise tumble from God's right hand straight down into the blockbuster's infernal banality?" Michael Booth in the Denver Post remarks that the movie is simply an overblown remake of the first two. "Everyone, in short, should move on. Show's over. There's nothing to see here, folks. Perhaps no two spider webs are alike, but it's getting harder and harder to tell the difference." And the headline of Eleanor Ringel Gillespie's review in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution sums up in three adjectives her criticism of the film: "Overlong, overdone and underthought." Still, several critics do have praise for the film's special effects. Joel Siegel of ABC's Good Morning America called them "the most breathtakingly believable" he's ever seen at the movies.