TheRetroCritic

Widely recognised as THE worst Spider-Man film to date, Spider-Man 3 was Sam Raimi's final outing as the Marvel hero's puppetmaster. Watching it back when it came out I was left entertained but a little bit confused to say the least. It looked like a decent Spider-Man movie and yet... Something was a bit off. Spider-Man 3 sees Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) yet again screwing things up with Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) and donning the black Venom suit as a million other things happen. You've got Thomas Haden Church turning into The Sandman and causing havok around the city for whatever reason, you've got James Franco's Harry Osborn finally taking over the Goblin suit (well, a  snowboard and a Cobra outfit), you've got Gwen Stacy (Bryce Dallas Howard) being introduced... it's certainly a handful and much more than just the usual mad-scientist-goes-nuts scenario. By the end you'll be wishing for a straight-forward mad scientist plot though... A lo

With the release of this new, slick Spidey reboot, there's been a lot of Sam Raimi bashing with people praising the new film for not being as silly as those early noughties efforts. I liked those movies! Well... the first two anyway. Then again the third one was pretty   lol... My point is these were fun comic-book flicks which, for the most part, got the cartoonish spirit of the comics and brought Spider-Man to us for the first time on the big screen. Sure those movies had their problems and there was a hell of a lot of shark-jumping going on in all of them but Spider-Man was never Marvel's darkest, moodiest character. One villain was a bird for crying out loud! An old man bird! That's freakin' ridiculous. Raimi delivered good old-fashioned popcorn entertainment. It was goofy but we loved it. Now comes The Amazing Spider-Man , a reboot with a brand new cast, a brand new approach and brand new everything. This time, we concern ourselves a bit more wit

Sam Raimi may not have seemed like the most obvious choice as director for this first proper Spider-Man movie at the time but he proved everyone wrong creating a popcorn movie with enough entertainment, humour and faithfulness to the comic books to feel like a worthy attempt. The film begins with tedious narration more suited to a Dr Seuss animation and closes with it as well so not the most promising of starts but from the moment we actually meet Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker things start making sense. Raimi goes for a lighthearted tone actually well suited to the character and the whole film feels very much like a comic book. The build-up to Parker becoming Spider-Man is perfectly handled with the film ticking all the right boxes in terms of superhero origin stories: teen romance, tragic family crisis, growing powers/puberty, bullies, clear villain... It's cliched but in a good way. There's a sense that it's all very self-aware and knows what it's doing. I sh

New poster for the upcoming Andrew Garfield-starring reboot The Amazing Spider-Man courtesy of SuperheroHype.com. Weird wall but cool poster, admittedly.

True story.

Sam Raimi's Spider-Man films never aspired to any gritty realism or a dark, brooding tone. They were bright, colourful, cartoony, gloriously silly comic-book flicks with the principal goal of just being loads of fun. And no matter how dumb the films got, they were always entertaining. So after Spider-Man 3 , the franchise's jump-the-shark moment, and before the eventual reboot I thought I should check out the best film of the trilogy to see if it still holds up. And you know what? It really does. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's not flawless: you do get some very goofy moments here and there and the film could have been trimmed a tiny bit but, on the whole, this is one surprisingly solid Spidey movie which fixes most of the first film's shortcomings and is all the better for it. For one thing, you've got a good villain in Alfred Molina's Doc Ock. With the Green Goblin's tight rubber suit far from sight, Molina makes Dr Octavius appropriately geeky