Just saw it yesterday. 30 minutes of awesome. 1 hour of 'meh, okay.' 30 minutes of 'WTF?'
It looks like we haven't gotten into full reviews yet, so I'll save that. (I can launch into a huge comic book dork review, but I'll refrain
). A year or two ago when I'd heard that they were going to have three villains (then it was going to be Green Goblin II, Venom & the Lizard), I was afraid they were trying to do too much. And that's what hurts this movie. Sandman was pretty much pointless. The Venom/black costume storyline deserve its own movie. Green Goblin II could almost deserve its own movie, but would be too boring to watch after having one whole GG movie. What they ended up with was that none of these things were fully fleshed out. The storyline that suffered the most is perhaps the relationship arc. It almost happened the way it did because it had to for the plot, but they didn't bother to really flesh it out in the way they could have (or did in the previous films). The final scene is so unsatisfying--and not because it's not entirely what you want to see, but because it's so...incomplete.
In the end, it wasn't a "bad" movie. It just didn't live up to the standard set by the first one. And that's the problem. LemonMacPhisto----I'd agree that it's not bad in terms of superhero/comic book movies in general, when you're lumping things like Hellboy, Ghost Rider, and other crappy things into the mix. But if you only consider the quality ones---Batman Begins and, most especially, the first two Spider-man flicks---I don't think it really compares.
The best things about the film are the Venom scenes, some of the relationship stuff, and the trailers.