Emo Peter cited as the reason Spidey 3 sucked only tells me that people can't deal with the irreverence with which Raimi deals with darker themes. People take offence because the movie doesn't portray everything with dead seriousness. Emo Peter is pitched as a Grease/1960's bad boy pastiche, and it's played humorously while maintaining the point it's trying to make and the role it plays in the movie.
If you look at Raimi's other work you'll find similar absurdist stylistic choices in the middle of much grimmer imagery. He's similar to Joss Whedon in that he undercuts seriousness with humour, but he does it in a far more punky and irreverent way. That's a big fuck you to people who WANT his stuff to be The Dark Knight, but the fact that it isn't is precisely why his Spider-Man works. It is rooted in real human emotion, but it's set against a deliberately stylized backdrop.
Spider-Man 3 is a result of too many cooks in the kitchen. If you actually take the time to identify the narrative threads and the themes it explores - the gray area between right and wrong, good and evil, the exploration of a hero as a villain and villain as hero - and untangle them from, oh, let's say one of the most convoluted set-ups for a super villain there are in Spider-Man comics, it's a perfectly fine story arc. The end result leaves no time to properly examine any of its plot threads properly, however, and it needs to hurry from one beat to the next. Emo Peter is not a sign of that film's shortcomings, on the contrary emo Peter is extremely deliberate, but I'll grant that it may be Raimi getting too comfortable injecting his offbeat style into a mainstream movie.
Amazing Spider-Man has, in early reviews of screenings, been referred to as the Twilight version of the Spider-Man story, and the good news is that it most likely points to an abundance of sobriety in its storytelling. That should be enough to service those that couldn't accept the fact that Raimi's films knew they were sorta silly, rolled with it and made that fact their own - but rather prefer that a film takes on a brave face and pitches things straight.
It's incredibly frustrating to hear people calling out Raimi and shitting on the previous movies because they couldn't deal with their tone, but hopefully now every Spidey fan has a film that suits their particular stylistic needs.
Personally, I'm just kinda bummed that everything seems to be an Oscorp mutant in this new film universe. I was sorta hoping for a mid-90s fantastical approach so we could see some more modern villains realised. I never really thought Venom fit with Raimi's established pseudo-scientific reality, whereas a reboot could've paved way for all that stuff by being more blatant sci-fi.
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