Adolescent Schmaltz

Rating: 3/10 (14 March 2018)

Maybe I should have expected this movie to be bad. The previous Spiderman movies with Toby Maguire were coated in a syrupy view of life. Virgin youth fighting cartoonish villains in a rich man's landscape. This one is more of the same, just worse. Andrew Garfield portrayed Peter Parker as an impatient, sullen teen laying around his room. Then swinging about in New York with a whole different personality. Emma Stone portrays his girlfriend who graduates high school and in the next scene in a high tech Oscorp corporate job. What? The movie portrays a rich man's landscape where those to be envied are the 1%ers and the battlefield is New York where this week's monster villain sprays bullets at random, but no one is actually killed. Blocks of New York are destroyed but no one is actually killed. No one is shown homeless due to the goings on. Ridiculous. Maybe it is the intended audience they are appealing to, teens and man-children. I can suspend belief and enjoy Sci-fi movies but the landscape has to be just a bit believable. Consequences happen, except in Marvel movies.
Poor Jamie Foxx is one of the villains, unrecognizable under makeup after the transformation. He is cast as a nerd, a nobody. See nerds are still acceptable to make fun of, to be the focus of human meanness. Previously that person would have been a Stepin Fetchit or some ethnic class but that is no longer PC to do but the meanness is still there. The desire to ridicule, the need to have a justification for offensive behavior. It's fun for the audience to make fun of people. You just have to pick the ones no one will object to. So the nerd. Jerry Lewis made a whole career out of it.
Typically the action sequences were filled with CGI that ignores any real physics but are fun to watch. Human interactions are sappy, banal, and adolescent. It would be nice to see a special effects movie peopled by complex adults. I guess the audience isn't there.