Iron Man Jr.

Rating: 6/10 (29 November 2018)

The fact that they rebooted Spider-Man three times in the past 15 years is reason enough to scoff at this latest attempt at making more money off the character. But, although nothing comes close to Raimi's definitive Spider-Man trilogy (yes I liked all three), I was surprised and found this movie somewhat enjoyable and much better than the previous two (The Incredible Spider-Man 1 & 2). Except it has one fatal flaw:
I can see what they were trying to do here by converting Spider-Man into a wide-eyed, enthusiastic, but very inexperienced kid. The exact problem is not that he is a dork that makes mistakes and doesn't know what he is doing yet. This aspect has a certain charm to it. The problem is that the writers neutered his powers and replaced them with Iron Man powers.
Spider-Man is about amazing spider-like physical skills coupled with a spidey-sense and fast reflexes, coupled with a freaky biological ability to spin webs. This movie kills almost all of that: His physical skills are still there except he somehow finds them useless without Iron Man technology, his spidey-sense is nowhere to be seen, and his biological spider-web thing has been thrown out and replaced with ridiculously impossible sci-fi technology from Stark. And then, after they neuter him like this, they replace all of this with more sci-fi Iron-Man-esque magic-suit capabilites, and then have Iron Man bail him out a few times.
I don't understand what they were thinking. Why make a "Spider-Man" movie only to convert him into a silly "Iron Man Jr"?