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READ: Spider-Man 3 review

The arrival of Spider-Man 3 on DVD allows you to take a fresh look at the movie removed from the cacophony of the summer-movie season — but, in this case, that's not always a good thing.

Picking up where the second installment ended, Spider-Man 3 finds Peter Parker happy and in love, his life seemingly free of super-villain interference. Since that can't possibly last, we are quickly introduced to regret-filled con-on-the-run Flint Marko, the man who shot Peter's beloved Uncle Ben and who, later, will learn that hiding from the cops inside a particle accelerator can have some nasty consequences. Sam Raimi — an unabashed fan of classic Spider-Man comic adventures — seems to be setting up Marko as the… forgive me for this… sand in the Vaseline of Peter's life, alongside an increasingly more unhinged Harry Osborne (who, at the end of Spider-Man 2, discovered his dad's Green Goblin arsenal). If the movie had stuck with this setup, it might have been a leaner, meaner, and more satisfying movie. Instead, Raimi — perhaps bowing to outside pressures — shoehorns in fan-favorite but clearly not Raimi-favorite villain Venom (a character with a cool look but a backstory more complicated than the Dharma Initiative — let's just say that it involves a lot more than conveniently arriving meteors) and throws together a sloppy final act that reduces Mary Jane to the screaming victim (again), Sandman to a mindless giant monster, and Green Goblin II to a good guy thanks to a butler's heartfelt (but a tad late) pep talk.

Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man 3. Courtesy of Columbia Pictures

Still, a second viewing highlights some of the film's better moments. The costume-less mid-air fight between Peter and Harry is exactly what you paid to see, as is the Hobbesian subway clash between Black Spider-Man and Sandman (nasty, brutish, and short). These look even better on DVD or, if you've taken the hi-def plunge, on Blu-Ray. The 2-disc boasts "over 10 featurettes" (it has 11, so technically it's not lying), but not all of them will be worth your time. The ones that focus on stuntwork, like "Hanging On… Gwen Stacy and the Collapsing Floor" or "Location: Cleveland — The Chase on Euclid Avenue" tend to be better, since the stunts also tend to be the better parts of the movie. The featurettes you can avoid are ones like "Re-Imagining the Goblin," which discusses how they changed a vaguely-Goblin-looking suit (well, it had a Goblin-faced mask, anyway) and turned it into something that Shaun White would wear to play paintball, and "Tangled Web: The Love Triangles of Spider-Man 3," which is Cliff's Notes for people too stupid to grasp the complexity of the film's character relationships. The six-odd-minutes of bloopers aren't really very funny, but they show Tobey Maguire being surprisingly more animated than we've ever seen him on film, and a cast commentary has just enough trivia tidbits to be engaging (you can skip the second commentary track, featuring the movie's producers — it's a bore).

Spider-Man 3 might not have completely avoided the curse of the three-quel, but it pulls through in better shape than some others in that category, and the DVD is loaded enough to make this a worthy addition to your collection. Unless you want to hold out for the inevitable Spider-Man 3.1.