“The last time I was in this position, I had to go to confession afterwards.”

Webdom-ination….

In THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2, Peter Parker/Spider-Man discovers his lost father’s work has come back to… bite his amazing ass. As Spider-Man faces off against a new antagonist created by electricity (Electro), a more familiar antagonist (the Green Goblin) seeks his blood – literally – for a transfusion to save his own life.

ElectroPoff

In a blaze of quipping and thwipping, we meet Spider-Man (Andrew Garfield) thwarting an armored truck robbery. Immediately we are privy to his goals: this crime-stopping gig is making him late to his own graduation ceremony, as his girlfriend calls him while he’s stuck to the grille of a speeding villain’s truck trying to shake him loose. “I’m stuck in traffic!” he tells her. His manner is devil-may-care, his virtuosity is astounding, as he acrobatically webs and words his way through the criminals. Spider-Man’s ethos has always been one of loose play-fighting, rather than powerful smashing; avoidance, and using the opponent’s excitability against them. Garfield pulls this off much better than Tobey Maguire.

These first ten minutes fantastically capture Spidey from the comics: a person who doesn’t take crime fighting too seriously; who is so far above the expertise of common criminals that he can afford to have fun with it. The angles, the movements, the web-slinging all capture the comicbook so perfectly, it jolts us back to our youth. Much about this movie is… amazing… not least, the way they’ve captured Spidey’s slim body in that redesigned suit (after fan uproar from the last movie, the filmmakers went the extra mile to design a more authentic suit – with nice big white eye-plates!). Spider-Man is not “rounded” any more, as he was drawn by veteran artists like Steve Ditko or John Romita Sr. or Jr. (which is how Tobey Maguire’s body was represented); he is slimmer and more action-lined, along the lines of more modern artists like Mark Bagley or Todd McFarlane. And I love the shape of his head.

This first masterful fight scene alternates with his girl Gwen Stacy (real life girlfriend Emma Stone) giving a graduation speech that needs to dial down the foreshadowing “…I know it feels like we’re saying goodbye, but we will carry a piece of each other into everything that we do next…”

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 is an excellent continuation of the rebooted franchise. It’s dynamic, poignant, bombastic and colorful and funny; each main character faces a battle within himself; there is rekindled friendship, forbidden love, and a death in the family. But it was ravaged by critics and fans. Because people are stupider now than at any other time in the history of movies. The dumbest amongst us are rising to the top through social media savvy. Retweets and the simplicity of creating disparaging YouTube content has imbeciles dictating what is quality without the faintest idea what quality is. Thus, in this era, many good to great films are being reviled for no reason other than uneducated people with no grasp of grammar typing uninformed comments. Such is the case with AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2, maliciously derided for seemingly no rational reasons.

“Okay Goblin, you win the award for Crazy Leo DiCaprio Smile.”

Opening scenes show Peter Parker’s father (Campbell Scott) in a sad farewell, closing the front door between himself and boy Peter; we sense the sadness in Peter as he grabs at his father’s hand… It’s not just Peter – *I’d* love to see more scenes with the great Campbell Scott. And then – we do! The filmmakers (writers Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, Jeff Pinkner and James Vanderbilt, and director Marc Webb) go further than the short mysterious parting they teased us with in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, following the fate of Mr. Parker, his wife (Embeth Davidtz), and his classified experiments, and their eventual fate at the hands of people stealing Parker’s science. It’s a very somber opening scene that sets a tone the movie itself cannot match – yet the filmmakers piggyback off this emotion in later scenes when they need to bring gravitas back into the quipping young Parker’s life.

Don’t even know whether it’s canon or ret-con, but Peter’s dad is shown working at Oscorp, alongside the head of the company, Norman Osborn (Chris Cooper). They create the radioactive spiders (one of which bites Peter’s teen ass in later years, to make him Spider-Man), a by-product of a formula to cure Norman’s degenerative disease. Norman’s son Harry (and Peter’s best friend) is played by androgyne Dane DeHaan, who suffers from the same hereditary disease as his father; he would petition Spider-Man for his blood, realizing Spidey is an inadvertent successful product of his father’s experiments; and then would resort to donning the New Green Goblin suit to halt the disease. It’s all interlocked quite nicely.

Blue Man Group Gone Wild…

Maybe Green Goblin’s predicament being so interwoven with Spider-Man’s history is what makes Electro’s tale seem somewhat insipid by comparison? Max (Jamie Foxx) is just a low level employee at Oscorp, a Lonely Guy who believes Spider-Man is his friend because Spider-Man saved him once and sarcastically quipped he “needed him.” Max falls into a tank of well-placed electric eels (because corporations regularly leave the lids open on their eel tanks) and is then able to manipulate electricity. Thankfully, he doesn’t wear yellow and green spandex (that would’ve been way too evil for PG-13).

One of the film’s best scenes is when Spider-Man faces off against Electro in Times Square, and through some stunning editing and directing, alternating slomo and zoom-pans, we see how he saves a whole bunch of people from an electrified beam. Strangely enough, another great scene involves no fighting at all: when Spider-Man is sitting quietly and talking with Harry Osborn, denying him his blood. We realize that we always see this red-and-blue hero in action and it is so cool to just see him in a loungeroom environment that isn’t blowing up and CGI’d.

Peter is hounded by the specter of Gwen’s dead father (Denis Leary), whose dying words to Peter/Spidey were not to date Gwen. It’s the right thing to do, because simply being with Gwen puts her in danger (him being Spider-Man an’ all), and ignoring her puts his testicles in danger (of exploding).

Poor Andrew Garfield – he makes a terrific Spider-Man; threading that dichotomy of tragedy and humor, pathos and levity. His ousting from the role is a combination of his outspokenness and corporate bullshit. The young pup who dons the underoos in CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR (Tom Holland) is not a patch on this guy! Oh, he’ll do a fine job going forward – he has the greatest production teams in the world – but a “better” job? Sigh…

In a monumental tease, we see a man walk past glass tanks containing the wings of the Vulture, the arms of Doctor Octopus and the armor of the Rhino. There were plans aplenty to keep this iteration of Spider-Man moving forward. Now shadows and dust, due to greed and cowardice. The only payoff is the Rhino (Paul Giamatti), who appears in a cliffhanger scene that finds the hero rising to the challenge after his lowest ebb – as any hero must – and swinging dynamically into action once more.

Single tear. We hardly knew ye, Andrew…

END

Another good character study cloaked in superhero duds.

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN is the latest RE-imagining/ RE-boot/ RE-working of Spider-man canon. RE RE RE… Here’s my word for it – REally? Did we really need to sit through 40 minutes of another origin tale – again? In this very well-made movie, over half of it is wasted plying us with Spider-Man’s Same Ole geek-bitten-by-spider-acquires-spidery-powers exegesis. (In a cool move, director Marc Webb – no, really – and writers James Vanderbilt, Alvin Sargent and Steve Kloves, throw in Peter Parker’s never-before-seen dark origins as well, lending more angst to his troubled teen.)

Why not hit the ground running? May I propose that Marvel and DC create one-minute bumper montages for each of their superheroes, outlining their origins? And run these bumpers before the opening of each respective film; maybe put them in song, like GILLIGAN’S ISLAND? “Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale / A tale of a fateful bug…”

Really?… Really?

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN is so well-made (with such a gritty look and suave production design) that I look forward to seeing this team’s sequel, where they are not hobbled by origin tale.

Andrew Garfield makes an excellent angst-ridden, irresponsible, bumbling, stuttering teen – Peter Parker/aka Spider-Man – uncomfortable in his own physics-genius skin, raised by Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen) and Aunt May (Sally Field – yes, Sally Field in a Spider-man film!); suddenly having to deal with acquiring super powers, discovering his science mentor, Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans) has become a murderous nine-foot lizard, and then further figuring how to touch Gwen Stacy’s panties (Emma Stone) without her police captain father (Denis Leary) castrating his websac.

And Spider-Man’s head is, once again, the exact perfect roundness.

It’s a less campy vision than the Sam Raimi/Tobey Maguire SPIDER-MAN, and – like all the modern superhero movies post-BATMAN BEGINS – trying to squash the square characters of the comics universe into the round holes of the real world. With our willing suspension of disbelief, AMAZING SPIDER-MAN amazingly succeeds.

Welsh Rhys Ifans does such a convincing American accent as Dr. Connors, I thought they were dubbing his voice at first. In trying to find a “cross-species genetic formula” to grow back his missing arm, he experiments with lizard DNA (because some lizards have the ability to grow back tails and limbs) and inadvertently transforms himself into a scaly naked bipedal reptilian – no, not Dick Cheney – The Lizard. The injection of genetic serum is played more like an addiction than a criminal mastermind plot, to the filmmakers’ credit.

Incidentally curbing small-time crime in his hunt for Uncle Ben’s killer, Parker starts to feel a responsibility to do so after awhile. (There is no melodramatic pitch: “With great power comes great responsibility.” That concept is more subtle here.)  When Parker takes the advice of those around him – to leave the apprehending of perps to the police – he finds that Leary’s police captain will not believe him about the Lizard, so takes that task upon his own skinny shoulders. (Spidey’s build has always been more whipcord than Herculean. Garfield’s rail-thin build suits Spidey perfectly. And due to the better technology, we feel Spider-Man’s litheness and athleticism more during his web-swinging than in the Raimi films.)

The Indian Gary Sinise, Irrfan Khan (SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE), is a scientific colleague. The great Campbell Scott has too little screentime as Parker’s father. Stan Lee in another of his hilarious cameos – as an oblivious librarian. There is no J. Jonah Jameson. Really? No loudmouth public nemesis to play off? But the film doesn’t need that complication – it’s already provided by Leary.

Playing police captain, Denis Leary does a bangup job as a straight man with a sardonic sense of humor, whose monologues about vigilantes (such as Spider-Man) once again shows us the thoughtfulness that went into this production, firmly entrenching it in real world environs.

I find the scene of Parker over Uncle Ben’s dying body a little disingenuous, as Parker yells, “Somebody call an ambulance!” We’ve grown used to this scene in movies – a dramatic high point. But – waitaminute! – they’ve set their movie in the modern world where everyone is communicating quite nonchalantly on cell phones; and Peter, weren’t you just messing with your cell phone not two minutes ago? Why don’t YOU call an ambulance?!

The two best scenes in the film are when Spider-Man builds an actual spider-like web in a junction of sewers, and reclines in the middle, waiting for his prey to send a telltale shockwave through one of the strands; and his first “save” of a life.

Up to that point, Parker had never considered he was anything more than a genetically-enhanced teen in a mask hunting his uncle’s killer; never considering himself the flamboyant name the public were tentatively calling him. When he saves a little boy on a bridge (whose father is B-Movie megastar, C. Thomas Howell), the father asks, “Who are you?” Parker replies, hesitantly, yet we see even through the mask an acceptance of identity, an answer to one of the film’s questions ‘Who am I?.’

“I’m… Spider-Man.”

It’s the most tearjerking Grand Moment in the movie. Though the filmmakers make him take off his mask just a little too much (as usual, for the emotions on his face to be seen), this moment with the mask ON is the most powerful, where he owns up to his identity, purpose and responsibility, in one fell swoop realizing his powers could be put to more use than just punching small-time bad guys.

Superhero movies became a vehicle for A-List actors ever since Brando’s Jor-El mumbled his way through SUPERMAN (1978), but now they are no longer playthings in which great actors seek refuge from “serious” roles, not least because of the massive economic cog they have become; superhero movies are now as much a showcase for great actors to show off their acting chops, as any movie featuring cripples or retards (cough–Oscar roles): consider Ben Kingsley in IRON MAN 3, Michael Caine in THE DARK KNIGHT RISES or Kevin Costner in MAN OF STEEL. And with the gamut of nuanced emotions he runs in this latest “realistic” superhero movie, I would gladly admit Garfield to that pantheon of choppers. And let’s not forget – Sally Field!

Really.

END