2012 superhero reboot
Rating: 9/20
Plot: It's just like this Spider-Man (hyphenated for Kent) except with a mutant lizard man instead of a goblin. And this one is in 3D.
Thank God! I've been wanting a movie to explain the origin of Spider-man for years!
It's like they decided to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Sam Raimi Spider-Man by releasing the same movie again with different actors and a different villain. When that first movie came out, the story already felt stale to me because Spider-Man was one of the handful of superheroes who had a backstory that I knew fairly well. So here's the story again, so soon after the other one came out that it's impossible not to compare the two. I'm not going to do much of that, however, other than taking time to mention that there was a Randy "Macho Man" Savage-sized hole in this one.
This is what they showed me on the plane. I was going to try sleeping but couldn't. It's entirely possible that I dozed off throughout this, and I'm pretty sure it was edited for time. Either of those could explain why this seemed so choppy and poorly-paced. And there seemed to be quite a few lazy storyteller shortcuts in this, like how the bad guy finds out that Peter Parker is really Spider-Man. This is heavy on the one-liners--as predictably lame as one-liners can get--and since you can't see Spider-Man's mouth move, they always seemed like voice-overs, lines added during the punch-up stages of the script-writing process. The action sequences are dizzying and cartoony, all special effect and no soul, and since you already know how everything's going to turn out in the end, you kind of just want them to end. I really liked Andrew Garfield as Peter Parker. He's charming enough and everything. This version of Spider-Man was a little too cocky though, and that character trait was either not developed enough (i.e. Spider-Man as a dynamic character who learns a little humility while he fights crime) or that was lost in the airplane edit. Denis Leary and Emma Stone's characters were silly cliches, and Rhys Ifans and his stump were really good, the lizard villain (I think he's named The Lizard) just didn't do it for me. The budding romance between Peter Parker and whatever the girl's name seems like it was developed to grab fans of Twilight movies. I might have just thought that because of Garfield's hair though. Oh, I did like Charlie Sheen's dad as Uncle Ben although he was also a little cartoonish. This adaptation of the Spidey story has a troubling lack of depth, a movie made for teenyboppers. If you're easily entertained by watching a guy in spandex fly around the city, there's plenty of that. A lot of that, I'm sure, was for the 3D or even just big screen crowd. I was just irritated. More irritating was a scene where a bunch of tough New Yorkers--construction workers and firemen, aka the real heroes--help out our titular superhero with some cranes. And most irritating? That would have to be the music, a horrible mix of bombastic blockbuster score and emo tunes.
Hopefully, the studio that makes these Spider-Man movies will give a little better effort in 2022 when they reboot this again. And hopefully, the sequel to this tedious reboot will reunite Sally Field and Burt Reynolds. It's about time Burt Reynolds gets a shot to play a comic book villain. Maybe he can be that guy with all the arms or the Riddler.
3 comments:
To throw you a bone of concilliation over the other film....I agree with pretty much everything you wrote about The Amazing Spider Man. A movie that did not need to be made, and was a complete waste of time. I read somewhere that Sony, which has the rights to this one Marvel character, had to make another film with Spider Man in order to keep those rights. So thats why they foisted this junk on us......to make sure they could make another Spider Man movie two or three years from now.
A ten from me, because Dennis Leary is funny.
What did you think of Andrew Garfield? I read a bit about this movie after typing this up and saw that a lot of people thought he was miscast. I kind of liked him.
Yeah, I saw that about Sony, too. I just don't understand why they felt the need to start the entire story over. They could have had a Spider-Man vs. the Lizard Guy movie without having it as part of his origin story. They could have just continued the Raimi stories with different performers. I think people watch these kinds of movies for the stories and special effects, not necessarily because of who is playing Spider-Man or his girlfriend.
I was okay with Garfield. I hate to say it, but that little Tobey Maguire guy was pretty damn good in the role, at least for the first two movies. Andrew Garfield didnt offend me in the role, and thinking back on the movie, was about the best thing in it. (Which is not saying much)
They could have done a BIG Spider-Man movie, with him facing multiple villains and big fights and all that stuff, and just skipped the origin story. But they wanted to save money and showing a colorful spider about to bite our hero for twenty minutes which is a lot cheaper than having some Green Goblin type flying around tossing bombs at him. This movie is just crass cashing in and money grubbing. Cheaply made blockbuster garbage.
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