The Amazing Spider-Man

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.

People Like Us

2012 movie

Rating: 11/20

Plot: Some nondescript guy named Sam has all kinds of financial problems and no fighting robots to help him out of his jams. He finds out that his father dies, and although he does everything he can to miss the old man's funeral, he is curious to find out if he was left any cash. Unfortunately, a large chunk of money was left to some boy he's never heard of. Sam investigates and discovers that that boy is the son of a woman who might be a sister he never knew he had. So naturally, he flirts with her.

I like riding on planes because it forces me to watch a movie that I otherwise wouldn't watch. I wasn't thrilled to get this one, but I didn't figure it would matter anyway since I was traveling with a toddler. Luckily for me, Buster didn't had so much interest in the woman trying to read and then sleep in the window seat, and I could just let her take care of herself. I kept trying to place the nondescript actor playing the nondescript protagonist of this. He has the type of face which made me think he's somebody I should know, like he's the next big thing or something. I looked him up. Apparently, he's Captain Kirk and the guy on the runaway train with Denzel Washington. His character here is strange, almost a stalker, and his charming ways really do make it seem like he's flirting with a gal he knows is his half-sister. There's no way that the half-sister, played by the mundane and probably-too-polished-for-this-role Elizabeth Banks, wouldn't think that. But Chris Pine doesn't have much range at all. That picture up there is pretty much all he does except sometimes he does it in a sadder way. And then there's Michelle Pfeiffer who doesn't seem old enough to be Captain Kirk's mom, but I'm sure she is. This is a a nice enough story, apparently based on a true story, but the whole thing is almost painfully comfortable. It's an elevator music kind of movie, criminally pleasant, and I'm really surprised that I was able to stay awake during it.