I liked it quite a bit. I'm not a comic book nut, so I don't have that basis to go off of. But I really enjoyed it.
Visually, it was outstanding (I saw the 2D version). It was really well done. They did a really nice job with the production.
The acting I thought was a strong point of the movie. Garfield and Stone both did a pretty great job IMO. It was pretty neat to see some (believable) emotion injected into the story. I guess I didn't realize how bad McGuire and Dunst did. Maybe it was Raimi's direction, but in hindsight, the 2000's movies were just pretty damn lifeless. Garfield and Stone were very good. I was skeptical, but they did a nice job.
Sally Field has really lost a step acting wise. She had a couple scenes where she did a nice job, and then she lays a dud. I also didn't realize Sheen was that damn old. Son of a bitch I'm getting old. Either way, he did a nice job.
The story, I thought, was pretty solid. Lizard was a good villain. I didn't have a problem with the story save two.
The minor one.
The major one...
Spoiler!
The whole Stacy dying/promise thing. Really? Wow. My wife liked it. I hated it. Stacy was a major part of the plot and they just killed him off to hold off the lizard for another 4 seconds. Really? There is no other plot function that could do that? Un-huh.
Then there was promise thing. That's the part that my wife liked. It tugged on her bleeding heart strings about the father protecting his daughter crap. That part I can believe. Fathers want to protect their daughters, but that doesn't mean it is a good plot tool.
And besides that, the promise is impossible. At least for me. Love, particularly young love abandons logic and tries to make it work. Invariably. I told my wife that if her dad told me to stay away, I wouldn't do it. Nobody would. Especially in an emotional state after her father died. And the hell of it is that Parker even admits it at the end. He's going to go ahead and break the promise.
So the bottom line is Stacy, a major plot figure, died to make Parker stay away from Gwen for a whole 10 minutes.
It seems to me it would have been better to forge a relationship and use that to show the city embracing him, and show him developing.
But the bottom line, is it left me wanting more, and I felt it was really well done. Which ultimately makes it a success.
But interestingly, the original Raimi Spiderman is now 10 years old. It will be interesting to see where this movie lies in 10 years. I think realistically, the Avengers plotline and Nolan's Batman changed the landscape tremendously. Without that progression, we probably wouldn't be nearly as critical of the Raimi Spiderman's. They don't hold up nearly as well given the context of the other movies. It will be interesting to see what comes in the future and how this movie compares.