Straight off the bat, I’ll lay my cards on the table and say I had very low expectations for The Amazing Spiderman. The sheer pointlessness of remaking the origin story a mere 10 years after Sam Rami’s first version largely overwhelms everything else about this film. So blatantly aimed at kids too young to have seen the first version, I am surprised they didn’t retitle it ‘The Totes Amazeballs Spiderman’.Let’s be frank here. This is no ‘reboot’. It is practically a straight up remake, bar a few minor details and fresh coat of paint. Substitute the Lizard for the Green Goblin and there is precious little here that you have not seen already in Raimi’s first movie. Even the Lizard’s motivation and the way he gets transformed is almost identical to what happened to the Green Goblin in the first Spiderman. Switch Gwen Stacey for Mary Jane, and ditch the organic webshooters in favour of the more comic friendly Parker inventions, and there’s really not a lot else that’s different to the plot.
This is not to say it’s terrible though. For the most part I had a pretty decent time with this film which is surprising considering the amount of ‘been there, done that’ on show here. First up, Andrew Garfield is an excellent Peter Parker. The movie struggles with the fact that both he and Emma Stone are just waaaay too old to be playing high school kids. It just doesn’t work AT ALL, but Garfield is so good as Peter Parker that you can actually see your way to forgiving it.
Unfortunately the same can’t be said for the usually excellent Emma Stone who struggles with a Gwen Stacey character that’s deeply dull and barely has more to contribute than being an expository device.
Rhys Ifans is good as the conflicted Dr Curt Conners, and Martin Sheen and Sally Field bring a gravitas to Uncle Ben and Aunt May that probably helps lift this film up higher than it deserves.
There are fun moments despite the familiarity though. Peter Parker’s discovery of his new powers on a subway train and in his bedroom is some slapstick joy to behold; and Spidey leaps about the city in a fun, kinetic jumble of limbs and webbing that feels lifted straight out of Romita Jr or McFarlane's sketchbook. There are some nice wisecracks and set pieces too. In particular the trapping of a car thief and subsequent sassing of a dimwitted plod, was a fun 5 minutes. Finally, Stan Lee's cameo in this one must rank up there as one of, if not THE best cameos he’s done. It’s hilarious.
Overall though, the crashing pointlessness of it all just washes over the movie like a tidal wave. The plot is full of holes, and yet another Spiderman movie insists on unmasking him at every given opportunity (a real bugbear of mine) .It’s a hard one to assess. The Amazing Spiderman is undoubtedly flawed, and it’s hard to tell if the things I enjoyed about it were solely down to its familiarity, or down to how well this film carries itself despite knowing exactly where it is headed at every possible moment. I had a fairly good time with it but rather than being ‘Amazing’ it’s more like ‘The Unnecessary Spiderman.’
IMDB: The Amazing Spiderman
