Movie Review #8: The Amazing Spiderman (2012)

Disclaimer: I know that in my review of Oblivion, I said that I wanted to add some variety to my reviews. By that I meant less superhero movies. Yeah, in this review I just went back on what I said, but hear me out. This review is different. This is the first movie I hated that I'm reviewing. So in a sense I'm adding variety to my review archives.

Well, a Spiderman reboot was inevitable. But five years after the last movie? Wow. This movie had the word "Forced" written all over it. Hollywood is really scraping the bottom of the barrel with this one guys.

From the very first trailers released for this film, we were promised the "untold story" of Spiderman. (Look at the poster I added). That was one of the main reasons I was excited for this movie. They hinted us along during the beginning of the film by showing that Pete's parents were a part of something that lead to their deaths. We received none of that. No payoff. They pulled a bait and switch with us and we (or I) fell for it. Typical Hollywood.

I felt that Andrew Garfield was a good choice as Peter in the looks department. In every other department, not so much. There was just something about his portrayal of Peter Parker that just bugged me. I enjoyed him as Spiderman swinging around on the screen, but I couldn't stand him when he was out of the suit. My favorite character in the whole movie was Dennis Leary's character. He was funny, and he reminded me of Willem Dafoe as the Green Goblin. Those two are like twins. Speaking of funny, this movie lacked just that. All of the jokes came as both awkward and unfunny to me, with the exception of Dennis Leary because he's just awesome. The villain on the other hand was not. The Lizard's backstory is so generic and obvious that it's almost absurd how dumb it is. The film is also too long and doesn't get interesting until about an hour and a half in! If they shaved a good 10-15 minutes off the runtime, It wouldn't have dragged on for too long.

Regardless of how much this movie infuriated me with it's uselessness and pointlessness, it had it's good elements. My favorite part of the movie are the visual effects. The final battle was stunning and actually quite thrilling! Another positive was the believable romance between Peter and Gwen. It makes sense considering Garfield and Stone are dating in real life. So that always makes thing more believable!

Final Report: Bring something fresh to the table when your rebooting a franchise so quickly. It reminded me too much of Sam Rami's Spiderman. I hate this movie so much that words can't begin to describe my hated. A completely pointless movie.