So much has been said already—so I figure if you’re reading your eighth review of Spider-Man 3 on Hollywood Jesus, you’re either a glutton for punishment or you really do love Spidey with all your heart.

I can’t claim to be a true Spidey lover, but I’ve been doing the comic and movie thing for so long, I have to pitch in my two cents. Yes, I’ve contributed my $8.75-plus to the $151 million figure, and I don’t regret it—but for the first time in the Spiderman trilogy, I won’t be giving them my $19.95 so quickly. Like a fan of a short-lived television series, I’ve watched the final Spidey installment attempt to tie up stories that deserved more screen time, and seen emotional depths left untouched.

Don’t get me wrong: there are a lot of things to like about S3, like the special effects that make Church’s Sandman move with blazing fury, the chase and battle scenes between Franco’s New Goblin and Spiderman, and the redemption of a few of the characters. I love that Peter Parker finds himself in a church, that Sandman asks for forgiveness and it’s granted, and that Harry Osborne dies on his own terms and not his father’s. But I thought the movie was a slow-moving behemoth that masqueraded as a superhero movie, but was really an emo-flavored take on one of the world’s greatest comic superheroes.

Maybe you’ll write me off as a Tobey-hater, but I’m tired of watching the same thing rising and fall in every Spiderman storyline as told by Raimi and depicted by Maguire. Does Spiderman/Parker really learn anything new in this third outing? Or is he simply reduced to a ridiculous caricature when in the clutches of the villainous symbiote? I’m not arguing that there isn’t redemption here, but like my frequent tirades against Christian media, it’s not enough to have a good message—you have to have a good product! And please, please don’t tell me that the $150 million is based on how great the movie is: you have the product of the first two (good), the marketing (great), and the absolute lack of any major competition until the end of May (Pirates of the Caribbean 3).

I hope that the current cast does walk off into the proverbial sunset, not unlike the cheesy end of S3. The crowd I walked out with was muttering about how great it was that there were more villains, villains you might actually care about, but that the ending was clumsy, and unfulfilling. Did we find ourselves caring at the end that Parker throws off the costume, or are we tired of his whining, tired of his complete rejection of what his Uncle Ben taught and his Aunt May reminds him of not once, but three times, in S3? At the end of the movie, were you convinced it was the way that the story should go, or that the production done everything it could to wrap up a movie that Maguire and Dunst have mentioned would be their last? Is that just adding to the hype or does the hype determine the product again here?

I haven’t looked forward to a movie more this summer than S3, but now my sights are lowered, and movies like Pirates, Shrek the Third, Transformers, Fantastic Four, and more, stand a better chance of not being a disappointment. Hopefully, they’ll learn from Spidey’s tangled web: some emotional and spiritual growth can go a long way.