You want to know why it didn't impress me much?
I'm a very emotional person, so it wasn't that. I love drama.
I'm a huge Spider-Man fan, so it wasn't any of the Peter/MJ/Harry moments.
I HATE Venom, and I blame the shoehorning of that character into the plot for a lot of the problems with the film.
I love Sandman, and I blame them not putting him in as a central character in order to fit in Venom for the major problems in the film.
Overall, what ticked me off was that they basically did EXACTLY what I predicted they would: A "dark Spider-Man" plotline. OOOH! What if Spider-Man went all dark and almost became a villain... And then he meets a guy who IS an evil version of himself? What if, huh?
I'll tell you "what if"... You get the same weak "evil twin" storyline you get in EVERY film or TV show that tries to use the "evil version of the protagonist" story. It's always cliche. It's always lame. Doesn't matter if it's Superman, Bewitched, or Star Trek-- The very idea that your worst enemy is an evil version of yourself is ridiculous.
The acting was fine. The basic plot was OK, except for all the forced Venom stuff and the serious lack of anything to fill out the Sandman as a villain. What sucked was that this movie wasn't so much about Peter Parker, and more about that stupid symbiote and how it made him act, how it made Brock act, and how it affected Peter's life. This was a movie about a pile of alien goo from who-knows-where (talk about contrived- It just fell to Earth one day?!?!) and the people it screwed with.
Why did you want Venom so bad? You KNEW he had a weak storyline. Seriously-- What's to like about him? Most people who love him would say it's because he's "badass" or "wicked" or something else based on his looks and style, but where's the substance?
He HATES Spider-Man. He's an alien/human hybrid. That's about it. He's essentially a combination of a Terminator and an Alien Xenomorph, except black.
Face it: The movie was weak (not terrible, just weak) because they had to bend over backwards to make a 1-dimensional character like Venom into the main event. They had to flesh out the story (evil Peter Parker! Ooh!) and force events (Meteor in the park? How did Venom know about Marko's daughter?) and dance all around a halfway decent story to insert a character that couldn't stand on his own.
Venom COULD work. . . But only if they filmed the Secret Wars, and all of Peter's activities in the symbiote costume, and had Mr. Fantastic explain things to Pete, and made Eddie Brock more than just a loser with a grudge. . . But they couldn't do that. They had to wedge it all into two hours.
What's worse is that the role played by Venom could easily have been any other Spider-Man villain, and they could have spared us the whole "dark Peter" thing entirely. They could have made it Electro who felt rejected and angry at Spider-Man for ruining things, or Mysterio could have been gunning for Spider-Man because he was humiliated by him. . . But they were forced by Venom fans to make an ALIEN MONSTER fit into the story they were building up, and it fell in upon itself because the alien monster was just a step too far and too shallow as a plot device.
Venom was every problem with this movie. You wanted a badass image of Venom on the screen, and you got it. It's too bad there's not much to Venom than his look.
