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Just this last weekend I found myself on an international flight over both the Atlantic Ocean and mainland America. With over fourteen hours of flight time, I had plenty of time on my hands. Seeing as I finished the book I brought somewhere over Greenland, and the nearest bookstore was 35,000 feet below and two million miles behind me, I was faced with the daunting decision of either watching Spiderman 3, or picking lint from my belly button.

I choose to watch the movie. Although an hour in to the film I found myself casting uneasy glances at my umbilicus, wondering if I had in fact made a grave error in judgment.

Never being one to give up on a commitment, I devoted myself to sticking with Spiderman 3 for its entire 140 minute running time, no matter how bad it got.

It got bad. Really bad.

Let's see, where do I start? Ah yes, plot. In short, there wasn't one. There were at least three hundred and twenty seven sub-plots, but for the life of me, I could never figure out where the movie was going. It was like watching a series of short films, all with the same characters.

The primary protagonist is our old friend Peter Parker, aka Spiderman, who was played by that same guy who was made famous in those movies where he was a Hobbit carrying a ring around. What's that you say? That was a different guy? Really? Hum, that's too bad. This movie could have been greatly improved with the addition of an actual POINT. As well as some orcs, wizards and elves thrown in for good measure.

Other characters include good old Mary Jane, the requisite love interest. Then there's some rich dude who keeps showing up in all these movies. He plays the triple role of being either Peter's friend, Peter's enemy, or the third leg of the cliche love triangle, depending on the immediate needs of the scene.

Oh, and there are two other bad guys as well. One is a two-bit hack photographer turned homicidal maniac and the other an escaped convict turned monstrous sand-creature. But the director saw fit to hardly include them until the very end and offered virtually nothing in the way of development, so by merely mentioning them I've already spent proportionately more time discussing them than is necessary.

This movie also has about ten thousand instances of deus ex machina, which turns out to be close to the total number of frames in the film reel as well. I suspect that is some sort of record.

One of the overt examples of a dues ex machina include the random dropping of a meteor near Peter and MJ, which

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