Looking back at the weekend, it’s clear that audiences were destined to be both driven to Spider-Man 3 en masse and, in many ways, disappointed by it. We ask a lot of our trilogy finales. We ask — no, expect — that they loom larger, crash more loudly and satisfy more deeply than ever before. Wrapping up a movie series means giving its fans a final, permanent picture of the narrative. Everyone attached to the Spider-Man series harbors his own “just right” vision of life for Peter and MJ. With a thwack more obvious than even George Lucas’s Return of the Jedi, Spider-Man 3 proves that Sam Raimi’s eccentric direction was not fit to meet the demands of the mass-market epic.

But it’s not so audacious to contend that, on its own terms, Spider-Man 3 is actually a pretty neat ride — more focused than the sprawling nothingness of Peter Jackson’s King Kong and certainly worthy of more laughs than anything Raimi has directed since Evil Dead II. The construction is clunky and the drama nowhere near as sobering as Spider-Man 2’s sense of spiritual crisis. But after 140 minutes of wrap-up, it’s remarkable that almost no one is calling the trilogy’s last entry a bloated drag.

There is indeed nothing spiritual about Spidey’s submission to the dark powers of hate and vengefulness, which manifests itself hysterically as a teen-queen catfight among him, girlfriend MJ and the dangerously sexy best friend, Harry Osborn (aka Goblin, Jr.). For whole sequences when Osborn would torture Peter Parker with his romantic prowess and Peter would respond by letting his hair hang in typical emo fashion, I thought I might as well be watching Cruel Intentions 4: When Superheroes Go Down.

I suspect this is all a way for Raimi to let some air out of a franchise that has become dangerously self-serious. The maxims about doing the right thing and making good on responsibilities are still there, but with his campy romantic drama Raimi seems to suggest that the concerns of superheroes are not actually so much more lofty than those of the bored twentysomethings who read about them. If the darkest and most serious comic book movies (Batman Returns, Hulk, Spider-Man 2) have pitched their heroes alternatively as Christ and Anti-Christ figures, Spider-Man 3 represents their logical counterpoint: a rollicking comic exploit with splashy style and an ironic appreciation of its own cutesiness. Alas, this is not the Spider-Man 3 most people wanted or expected. But if Hollywood’s comic-book fetish isn’t to be crushed under the weight of its own epic inanity, maybe it’s the one they needed.