5 Comic Book Movies That Deserve A 2nd Chance (And 5 You Should Forget)

3. Spider-Man 3

The creative pressures of releasing three movies in five years became apparent with this sequel, which undoes all the good work of its predecessor. Seemingly spat out by a computer, the script substitutes empty spectacle for action and makes the characters so dull that every interaction somehow rings flat.

Consider the movie’s sub-plot (and lowest point), where Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) is transformed by an alien virus that just drops out of the sky. There’s no real sense of a conflicted character as Peter adopts an emo look, starts cursing (he says “damn” a lot) and walks down the street shooting women with his finger. When he upstages Mary Jane in the jazz club where she works by performing an impromptu dance, there’s just an impression that he (and the movie) has gone stark raving mad.

Worse, the villains only appear as the plot demands, so when Sandman, Venom and the New Goblin aren’t needed, they presumably just skulk around behind the scenes, waiting to make their entrance. It’s been a lesson that superhero movies have (generally speaking) abided by ever since – tripling the number of adversaries does not triple the amount of fun.