A film
review by Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer, July 3, 2012.
Maybe
it's the screenwriters' way of justifying their deja-vu-all-over-again reboot
of a still-familiar franchise: In The
Amazing Spider-Man, a high school English teacher looks over her class of
twenty-somethings disguised as pimply teens and puts the lie to the old saw
that there are just 10 original stories in all of literature. In fact, she
says, I'm here to tell you there is only
one.
In other
words, don't come to The
Amazing-Spider-Man looking for originality.
A
competent, though entirely unnecessary, reengineering of the Marvel Comics
title — arriving 10 years and two months after Sam Raimi's more fun, more
energized Spider-Man, and just five years since Spider-Man 3 — The Amazing Spider-Man brings fresh
faces and 3-D bells and whistles to the adventures of a moody nerd-boy who gets
bitten by a radioactive arachnid and morphs into a smart-talking, web-slinging,
thug-busting superhero.
Andrew Garfield, the Brit who played Facebook
cofounder Eduardo Saverin in The Social
Network, picks up the Spidey mask dropped by Tobey Maguire, bringing a
spindly physique and twitchy angst to his portrayal of Peter Parker, the Queens
kid who lives with his kindly uncle and aunt (Martin Sheen and Sally Field),
and becomes a unitarded vigilante to
avenge the death of you-know-who and thwart the evil machinations of a
ya-da-ya-da.
The evil
machinations in director Marc Webb's
version (talk about aptly named!) come courtesy of The Lizard, one of the
oldest of Spidey's comic book nemeses, played here in human form as scientist
Dr. Curt Connors by Rhys Ifans.
Connors, we're told, is the world's
foremost authority on herpetology, the study of reptiles and amphibians,
and, as it happens, was long ago partnered with Parker's brilliant geneticist
dad on a cross-species tissue regeneration project. Connors lost his arm in a
laboratory mishap, so he has a personal interest in this regeneration business.
And young Parker has his father's old notebooks, and the decay-rate algorithm
that is essential to the equation — and that serves as The Amazing Spider-Man's plot-propelling MacGuffin. (Speaking of
MacGuffins, Parker has a poster of Hitchcock's Rear Window on his bedroom wall.)
And then
there is saucy, saucer-eyed Gwen Stacy (a very blond Emma Stone), who is: a.) Parker's high-school classmate and
impossible object of desire, b.) Dr. Connors' favorite intern at Oscorp labs,
and c.) the daughter of NYPD Capt. George Stacy (Denis Leary), who decides that this Spider-Man guy shouldn't be
allowed to disrupt traffic with his crime-fighting antics. (Note to Leary, and
to Field: do not let your agents talk you into doing another 3-D film. The
scrutiny of the stereoscopic format is not flattering!)
The Amazing Spider-Man is very much a story in two parts:
The first hour is spent establishing Parker's backstory, and Spider-Man's
origins. We witness Parker's subway-ride discovery of his newfound powers and
the havoc they can wreak; the skateboarding stunts he is now capable of
(another poster in Parker's bedroom: Mark Gonzalez, the street-skating
pioneer); his awkward courtship of Gwen, and the worried look in Uncle Ben's
and Aunt May's eyes as the boy they have raised since toddlerhood starts
staying out late and coming home with big bruises and a bad case of the
munchies.
The
second half of the film is a pile-on of CGI effects and thundering face-offs
between Spidey and The Lizard. There's a daring rescue in the middle of the
Williamsburg Bridge, and there's plenty of skyscraper-scaling slugfests, as
Spidey has to contend with the gigantic reptile iteration of the Welsh actor
Ifans and save a huge chunk of Manhattan from a chemical fallout that could
turn the population into lizards. (Don't go into the sewers! They're literally
crawling with the things!) The Oscorp Tower, an architectural wonder that gives
The Avengers' Stark Tower a run for
its money, is where everything comes to a loud, climactic head. You can
practically feel Webb, director of the charmingly gimmicky love story (500) Days of Summer, get overrun by
effects techies and stunt choreographers and hologram designers. The Amazing Spider-Man goes from what is
essentially a teenage identity-crisis love story with nice quirky moments in it
(Garfield and Stone shoot sparks) to a studio-ordered, supersized slam-bang
summer tentpole. Audiences will probably respond to it — Spider-Man, after all,
is one of Marvel's true icons, a Silver Age hero with us since the early 1960s
— but this one was made to please a more select demographic: Sony shareholders.
Like
most superhero movies, The Amazing
Spider-Man taps into our primal dreams and desires. Emotional and physical
flaws, feelings of inadequacy, our losses and lost chances ... all are given a
chance at redress and redemption. It's hard not to respond to stuff like that
on some level. But it's also hard to keep interested in the big screen, big
noise, big whoop of it all.
Labels:
action, adventure, fantasy
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