Director: Marc Webb
Running time: 136 minutes
***
I’VE only met one person who doesn’t know the story of Spider-Man – after all, the last outing was only six years ago – and presumably Martin Sheen is fully up to speed now, since he plays the kind but doomed Spider-Uncle in Sony’s slick new reboot.
In the opening sequence, Uncle Ben and Aunt May (Sally Field) take in young Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) when his parents disappear abruptly, and over two hours you may not experience superpowers but you will certainly feel a little déjà vu as the film ticks off many familiar tropes. There is alienation, radioactive spiders, and then unexpected superstrength and a heightened instinct of oncoming danger. There is the discovery that with power comes responsibility, and of course there is a newly buffed-up young actor unselfconsciously donning spandex.
There’s also a girl, and the film perks up whenever Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) clomps across the screen in her knee boots. Stone is a throaty, sassy kick, and Gwen comes with a little family dysfunction of her own – although in her case it’s not so much an absentee father as a city chief of police (Denis Leary) who is a little too present and controlling as a parent.
You could easily make the case that Spider-Man has returned to us at the peak of his zeitgeist as the people’s superhero. Superman is an alien, The Avengers are mostly aristocrats or brawny scientists, the X-Men are mutants, and Batman is a brooder living in a stylised gothic version of America, but Spidey lives in Queens with his aunt and his acne.
Mostly, the new film reminded me how much I miss Toby Maguire. Before he teamed up with Sam Raimi in 2002, he seemed to be the weakest link in the web, but his watchful manner and wry diffidence made him a persuasive nerdy introvert. Garfield has done geek duty himself in The Social Network but his Peter Parker is a charmer with good hair and a hit-and-miss way with a wisecrack. This is not the Amazing Spider-Man, it’s the Reheated Spider-Man with some of the interesting awkwardness wiped off.
The second half of the film focuses on Spider-Man’s battle with another mutant: Rhys Ifans’ Lizard. Like Spidey, the Lizard is a human being who came by his powers through freaky genetics, but while his serum allows the geneticist to regrow his missing arm, it also gives him superstrength and drives him insane. Does this sound awfully like Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin? Crikey yes, except that the Lizard’s bad moods come and go, Jekyll and Hyde-style, as does the arm.
You may find it hard to care about the duels between human bug and cantankerous reptile, since Marc Webb’s action sequences often feel cloddish and assaultive. I’m all for superheroes with rich emotional lives, but when the synthesis of action and emotion is lopsided, you can’t help feeling the picture has lost some of the iconic qualities of the comic book.
The movie’s real limitations, however, are built-in: here’s another big-screen comic book when comic books are what we now get at the movies every summer. And it’s not as much fun as The Avengers, nor is it as stylistically interesting as Batman. Next time Spider-Man weaves his web, let’s hope it’s more intriguingly tangled. «
On general release