Spiderman as he should be seen

Rating: 7/10 (27 April 2014)

Well the boy spider struts his funky webs all over again and well, it was okay. You know me, a super-hero tart, my inner fourteen year old usually laps this stuff up (see my review of Winter Solider here) but Spidey, both in this incarnation and in the Tobey Maguire juggernaut, leaves me a little cold. Of course I'm being churlish. The visuals are incredible, the script sparkles, the acting is excellent. The 3D worked harder here, but it should really with the subject matter.
The film opens with the familiar spider logo flexing on the screen as it becomes part of Spidey's suit as he plummets to the New York streets webs a-flying! Amazing. The story's good too, deeper than previously, but Spidey is still basically a teenager and precisely the things that appeal to that demographic put me off. The macho Roger-Moore-as-James-Bond patented good guy banter that punctuates the comics is here too, undermining the visuals and the reality - (yes I know it's a story about a boy bitten by a radioactive spider so it's not meant to be real!). When you're flying about trying to pick up lots of bouncing glass vials of plutonium would you really joke with the bad guy driver of the stolen truck? A suspension of disbelief too far - perhaps Spiderman just needs to secure it with a bit of his web.
Andy Garfield gives a much more emotionally nuanced Spiderman and Emma Stone does a great job of being the sassy, clever and kick-arse heroine - she certainly has more dimensionality than Kirsten Dunst's Mary Jane Watson in the nerdier Tobey Maguire re-boot. Sally Field is a better Auntie May as is Martin Sheen as Uncle Ben, in fact the acting is seriously up a gear in this new re-boot with Jamie Foxx as Electro and Dane DeHaan as a slow-burning Green Goblin. But it still doesn't emotionally grip or have that slantways satirical lilt of the Avenger Assemble or Iron Man. And I think that's it, I love a Marvel superhero movie but I do like the satire, the great one- liners, the gentle mickey take of itself. Spidey's bad guys darknesses are undeveloped and untwisted, yes I know they're that way in the comics too. I want darker, nastier and altogether more conflicted bad guys I think and the Spidey Universe seems a little too simple.
But The Amazing Spiderman 2 is brilliant entertainment with wondrous effects and explosions and lots of running, leaping and jumping. The little kid who used to watch the Spiderman cartoons as a kid on ITV would have totally loved it. Spiderman as a concept totally loved, brilliantly brought to the screen and envisaged, as good as this particular franchise gets. It is just that the original comic book didn't really delve into the depths like some of the other characters in Marvel.
Does this lukewarm review mean I'm finally growing up? God, I hope not.
(Four stars ****)