Nope. Which is frustrating because I could feel a really great movie in Spiderman 3 fighting to get out. Unfortunately Raimi buried it under layers of subplots and a couple tons of sand.

The setup goes a little something like this. Peter Parker/Spiderman (Tobey Maguire) is a happy guy. He’s blissfully dating Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst), the girl of his dreams. She’s starring on Broadway, madly in love with him and totally cool with his whole alter-ego thing. He’s a hero to millions of New Yorkers and the star of his college classes. Yup, everything’s coming up Parker, which is when the super villains start popping up.

First you’ve got former best friend Harry Osborne, still nursing a grudge over his father’s death two movies ago. He tricks himself out in Daddy’s Green Goblin gear and comes gunning for Peter. Then there’s Flint Marko, escaped con, who conveniently stumbles into some sort of molecular experiment and becomes the Sandman, a creature who is really strong and can shift shapes and, I don’t know, drip through an hourglass like the days of our lives or something. Then there’s Eddie Brock, Peter’s unscrupulous rival for a photojournalist job who also conveniently gets superpowers. Oh, and did I mention Peter becomes something of a villain himself when he’s infected with some space goo that conveniently lands near him?

Do you think I used the word “conveniently” a lot in that last paragraph? Yeah, me too. Sadly, it fits. The script, by director Sam and his brother Ivan Raimi and Alvin Sargent, relies heavily on coincidence to move itself along. I’m willing to excuse a lot of that in the service of story – especially a story that, by its nature, is sheer fancy -- but here it gets to the point where it just seems lazy. (Really, they couldn’t figure out a more sensible way for Eddie to get himself goo-infected? Because I can and I’m not even trying that hard.)

So there’s villain overload, which works to the movie’s detriment. On top of that, we have Peter and Mary Jane’s disintegrating relationship and the murder of Peter’s uncle (which you only thought was resolved in a previous film). The filmmakers tried to pack way too much into one movie. Characters disappear for such long stretches that you nearly forget they were ever there to begin with. Frankly, the Sandman plotline could have been cut altogether. Raimi tries to make us care about Marko (Thomas Haden Church) by giving him a sick kid whose picture he frequently pulls out and moons over, but neither he nor his alter ego were all that interesting to me.

At least the other villains brought something to the thematic table. The New Goblin storyline provides some growth for Harry’s (James Franco) character while Eddie Brock/Venom (Topher Grace) is kind of the flip side of Peter/Spidey. As for the dark side of Spidey himself, brought on by that groovy goo, it works nicely to emphasize the growing arrogance and self-involvement of a young superhero-about-town. The sequence where he’s strutting his stuff as the newly confident – but still dorky – Bad Boy Peter is funny, if a bit too lengthy.

Maguire and Dunst are still good. The only other real standout performance is Grace as the smarmy Eddie. He’s excellent, even handicapped by an underwritten role and muddy motivation. If the filmmakers had dropped Sandman and given us lots more Venom, this could have easily been the best Spiderman of the series. Instead I think it’s the worst, proving once again that bigger ain’t necessarily better.