IMDB Score – 7.1
RT Score – 73%

Superhero movies. Honestly, I can’t grasp my head around them. Part of my brain says they’re horrible and will continue to be horrible if directors continue to please the executives instead of the fans. Part of me says that in the right hands these films can produce great results. One Batman film and one Marvel film comprises the top tier. The Dark Knight and The Avengers were really fantastic films that just happened to have superheroes as their subjects. The second tier comprises the first and two Nolan Batman films, the two Tim Burton Batman films, and that’s all. The rest vary from absolute crap to enjoyable but ultimately forgettable movies. It sucks that I can’t get into these films like others do and while I don’t particularly HATE superhero films I just can’t fathom how so much money and time is spent each year on producing sequels and beginning films for countless upon countless superhero films when the end results are usually poor. They’ll keep trying though. Maybe it’s not a bad thing. Maybe I’m one of the very few people that actually want them to give the superhero film a rest for a while but I’m not going to blindly hate a film just because it features a mask hero or somebody with mutant powers.

I didn’t hate this film.

I grew up watching the 90s animated Spiderman on television. To me, this is the definitive Spiderman on a screen. I’ve never been a big comic book fan but Batman movies and the Spiderman TV show are nostalgic pleasures on mine. I found the Sam Raimi films to be pretty enjoyable except the third one which was a pile of shit when Venom wasn’t on teh screen which was criminally too infrequent. I’m not a big Toby McGuire fan though so maybe I was a bit biased. Andrew Garfield takes the reigns here and did an okay job. I actually thought he acted decently, well, maybe for this one scene where…well, I have no idea what he was doing in this. Like, seriously, what is this?

That got a great laugh out of me. Just look at his face. It’s just so funny.

The film focused more on the relationship between Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy which I believe holds to the comic way more than the Raimi films did as Gwen Stacy wasn’t really even in those films. Emma Stone was a miscast though. I think she’s a great actress but she is not a seventeen year old. She doesn’t look like she’s seventeen. The fact that was was seventeen in the movie is a farce because no seventeen year old talks, acts, dresses like that or works as an intern at a scientific research facility. It just doesn’t happen that way. The rest of the cast was filled with great actors in forgettable roles which best describes the film as a whole, forgettable but it was fun while it lasted. There were some pretty good set pieces, particularly any scene featuring Spidey and The Lizard. I’d say it’s pretty much on par with the first two Raimi films as it’s kind of the same movie for the first two thirds. Peter gets bullied, gets bit, beats up bullies, avenges Uncle Ben sort of, figures out “hey this is fun”, shit goes down, saves the day, sort of gets the girl sort of.

All for the price of millions and millions of dollars. I hope Marc Webb directs his sequel a little bit more differently for all the money that has been poured in it. That’s the only way I’ll say that I was generally impressed with a super hero film. You have to do something different.

3/5