Movie Review: The Amazing Spider-Man

When I first heard they were rebooting the Spider-Man franchise after only ten years I was highly skeptical. I am not This is the first time in my life where they have rebooted a franchise where I remember seeing the original installment.in theaters. Well now the reboot, The Amazing Spider-Man, has been released and my skepticism was warranted as this film couldn't even live up to my modest expectations.

The Amazing Spider-Man would've been more accurately titled The Frustratingly Average Spider-Man. With the exception of some good acting ( Andrew Garfield is a solid Spider-Man and Emma Stone steals the movie as Gwen Stacey) this is a mind-numbingly average reboot. It is more faithful to the comics than the original series and there are a lot of nice ideas on display here (Showing how strong he is/every scene where he is discovering his powers, Spider-Man's sarcasm, the relationship between Peter Parker and Gwen Stacey, Peter finding about his father, plenty more), these ideas are just poorly executed. The weak script really kills the whole movie. It tries to establish a dark, gritty tone (a la Christopher Nolan's Batman movies), but it's such a ridiculous movie that it completely cancels out the dark elements. It takes itself way too seriously (which Sam Rami's original franchise never did) and that is a huge drawback for this film. It also doesn't help that The Lizard is one of the worst villains in the history of superhero films. He has no motives or legitimate reasons behind his actions which makes the whole conflict between him and Spider-Man completely stupid and pointless. Good villains are a vital part of superhero films and without a menacing and/or memorable villain it makes it a lot less fun to watch and The Lizard sure as hell is not a good villain. The CGI is also pretty bad for a film with such a high budget. The Lizard is one of the stupidest and unrealistic looking CGI creations of the past decade. Hell even Green Lantern (which had pretty unimpressive CGI as well) had better CGI than this. Another huge drawback was the lackluster direction from Marc Webb. Webb is a talented director, but this is so far out of his comfort zone and his skills are not on display here at all. He has no idea how to handle action. The action scenes here are terribly shot and really mediocre. Webb was the complete wrong choice for this movie and hopefully he isn't asked to come back for the inveitble sequel.

The Amazing Spider-Man is a useless and underwhelming reboot. The filmmakers did put the effort in to try to make it a more faithful adaption of the comics, but it was all for not due to the poor screenwriting and directing. The actors really do try their best and they are the primary and pretty much sole reason this film is  even somewhat watchable. The Amazing Spider-Man is far inferior to any of Sam Rami's original franchise (yes even 3). Rami's films might not have 100% accurate to the comics, but at least they were well-written, engaging and fun films with great action scenes and excellent villains (save for the third one). The reboot has none of that and if this series continues (which is bound to happen) I hope they fix the giant mistakes that this film got bogged down with.

2.5/5 Stars