A horrible choice by raimi a supposed spider-man fan.
so no one could come up with a better angle for pete wanting to take down the sandman?
Yeah, this was the biggest mistake in the franchise. All he had to do was have Sandman knock Aunt May over when he was sandblasting through the city and put her in a coma. She was missing for the whole movie practically anyway.
As for quips...I think they started out with the idea of doing more quips, but they either weren't funny enough or got in the way of the action.
I say this because the first set report I read of spider-man was in a uk sci-fi mag and it went into detail on the 1st fight with the Goblin.
There was a scene that was filmed with the Goblin saying 'What do you want?'
and Spidey replied 'World peace, but I can't have that I'll have a piece of you.'
So glad they cut that out.
I'd rather have no quips/puns than average or bad quips/puns.
The best one so far i think has been to the wrestler 'That's a nice outfit. Did your husband make it for you.' Because it did the job of winding up the opponent whilst showing that Spidey's confidence was increasing in that early fight.
As others have said, there are certain types of fights where quipage would just get in the way, and even if some lines work on page , they may not stand up to repeated viewing or work onscreen.
If someone comes up with an alright line that isn't some bad pun, fine, but it would be awful if they tried too hard to make him funny and we just got something akin to a McBain line, like the 'world peace' line.