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.
