The travesty of the new Spider-Man movie isn’t that it’s a greedy
cash-grab on a franchise reboot that hardly needed rebooting, but that it
couldn’t get anything in it right: the casting, the action, the plot, the woefully
wooden dialogue, the menagerie of misplaced scenes and forgotten storylines …
it makes Battleship look like
performance art.
Oh, this is bad. Worse than most big movies. It’s just so
ill-conceived and poorly executed. It lacks coherence and depth; it’s the kind
of movie that has no understanding of its moving parts or even its very soul.
It’s up there on the screen reciting words to which it doesn’t understand their
meanings.
Obviously, there’s an audience for this movie. It’s for people
who mark the passage of time by each new superhero movie they see. (Here’s yet another
one; mark your calendar.) It’s also for people who admire the comic books, to
which I must ask: “Were the first three movies not enough to quench your
thirst?” I actually admire Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies, but I am eternally grateful the series is ending
this summer, before it gets bloated and frustrating. But do Spider-Man fans
expect a new movie every other year? Are they ever fulfilled? Do they enjoy
retreads of the same idea over and over again?
These are questions that will never get answered, which is
fitting because that’s a theme that infects every mutated cell of The Amazing Spider-Man, a movie of
unparalleled blandness and disappointing mystery.
Here we go again: boy genius Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) is
bitten by a radioactive spider, which turns him into Spider-Man. This version
of Spider-Man is only half-mutant, though, which is why he has to design
mechanical web shooters that he latches to his arms like wristwatches. I liked
the web effects better when they were biological functions in Spidey’s arms,
but whatever. Apparently the comics clarify this, but good luck going back hundreds
of issues to sort it all out.
Parker is in high school, though he’s smart enough to finish
advanced bio-engineering formulas in billion-dollar labs. (He’s so smart, yet
later he asks the dumbest question about cold-blooded animals.) It’s in this
lab where he’s bitten by the spider and also where he falls in love with Gwen
Stacy, who is dressed in knee-high boots and a micro mini-skirt, you know,
because that’s what people wear when they do science experiments. Luckily she
wears a lab coat so everyone knows she’s a real scientist.
Gwen Stacy is played by Emma Stone, an actress we have learned
has considerable talent. Last year she was in The Help, a movie about female empowerment that breaks through a
vast racial divide. Now here she is in Spider-Man
playing “the girl who needs to be rescued.” They call that backwards
evolution.
Stacy and Parker share dialogue that’s so inconceivably bad that
it’s laugh-out-loud funny. A scene in a school hallway is especially atrocious/hilarious.
Another scene at the Stacy household (with Denis Leary wearing pink lipstick?!)
is ham-handed and clumsy. They just don’t work together: she’s all woman, he’s
all wimp, and they both just stare at each other and fidget. I’ve seen better
chemistry at grade-school science fairs, usually in that dark corner where they
put all the kids with plaster volcanoes.
The movie throttles up plotline after plotline and then abandons
them: an apparently ill Dr. Osborne (aka Green Goblin), a maniac high school
kid who seems to be on the verge of a shooting spree, flashbacks to failed science
experiments, Parker’s murdered parents and Gwen Stacy’s policeman father. In an
especially infuriating sequence, Spider-Man goes on a hunt for the man who
killed his beloved uncle. Vast portions of the second act are devoted to this
endeavor, but then it’s dropped from the plot as if it never happened.
Mostly, though, the film is just sloppy: henchmen traverse time
and space in ways that defy physics, cell phones don’t work at plot-dictated
moments, characters switch allegiances on the tiniest of whims, and
construction workers just so happen to have enough cranes to form a canopy over
Manhattan ’s Seventh Avenue
so Spidey can web up the street. The film introduces places, people and events,
and then just slaps them into conflicts without logically thinking how the
action will progress in any sort of visually coherent way. It’s a collage of
frayed ends and clumpy knots.
Director Marc Webb ((500)
Days of Summer) could have certainly done a better job improving the film’s
clunkiness, but I reserve most of my frustration for Garfield, who is the wrong
actor for this superhero. Rarely has star casting been worse. He fails to
connect with every aspect of Peter Parker, from the discovery of his powers to
his awe-shucks dorkiness. And the dialogue is just terrible. At one point he
tells the reptilian villain: “Somebody’s been a bad lizard.” (Groan.)
Now, I didn’t care for the original Spider-Man movies (with slight exception to Spider-Man 2), to which I blamed the casting of Tobey Maguire, a
weak actor playing an even weaker version of Spider-Man. After witnessing the
acting calamity in The Amazing Spider-Man,
though, I can’t believe I’m actually missing Maguire and his bombastic
awfulness. In his place is Andrew Garfield, whose cringe-worthy acting makes
Maguire look like Sir Laurence Olivier.
I took a lot of vitriol for my thumping of the original Spider-Man, but I will say this: it was a
better movie. And Sam Raimi is a better director, one who understands movement
and plot, and one who knows how to introduce story elements and then give them meaningful
resolution.
This new Spider-Man is
not nearly as classy. Frankly, it’s a mess. And even worse: it doesn’t do
anything new or exciting that wasn’t already done in the previous three Spider-Man movies. If only Hollywood knew it was
shooting itself in the foot. After all, how many times will audiences pay for
the same movie (or a worse version one)?
Who knows, but after The
Amazing Spider-Man it’s one less than before.
