Three strikes and out, and now yet another fumbled swing

Rating: 6/10 (28 July 2012)

They said it was going to be a 'Batman Begins' style reboot of a franchise that had been destroyed by studio interference. It was a promise they did not deliver.
The Amazing Spider-Man is well below Batman Begins when it comes to aesthetic, direction, writing, sound design, cinematography, music, and editing. In fact, I reckon that the three men who cut this film together be ejected from Hollywood. It was, by far, the most poorly edited film I have seen in a long time. It boggles the mind that Pietro Scalia has two Oscars. The fight in the subway was incomprehensible to me. Peter Parker is stuck on a girl's blouse and the next moment there are a bunch of unconscious people on the floor. What happened? And puh-lease stop using 'stutter cuts', they are getting really old and annoying.
John Schwartzman, who made The Rock and Armageddon look so good, gives us a fairly bland color pallet. Too afraid to be dark, and too smart to revert to Raimi's ostentatious style. It exists somewhere in between, with all the visual appeal of a TV movie. Though this might be in part due to the fact that I saw the 2D version. The effort here is phoned-in. If anything Sony have given Spider-Man a 'Batman Forever' makeover. There's so much disappointment in this new incarnation of Spidey, but it's still an improvement over Sam Raimi's garish, cartoony trilogy.
Newcomer Andrew Garfield is the teenage Peter Parker (despite being 27 at the time of filming) who is bitten by an experimental spider at Oscorp, where he has detoured from an intern open day. As we've seen before, the bite gives him super powers. As we've seen before, he uses them to get his own back on Flash Thompson. As we've seen before, Uncle Ben dies before Peter learns to use his powers for good instead of indulgence.
So far, so familiar. The one thing so many superhero origin movies suffer from is the fact that once the new powers have been established the subsequent plot of the rest of the film feels like a half-assed afterthought. Amazing Spider-Man does a slightly better job of tying the main story to Peter Parker's history, but it's completely ineffectual. Such a shame as the Lizard had the potential to be a memorable, tragic villain and yet he only comes across as a token bad guy carrying the burden of the worst motivations I've seen in a mainstream movie. The Oscorp plot is virtually unintelligible and has convenient contrivances that would make even the cheapest screenwriter groan. And that evil Asian guy was a poor character, poorly acted. I was amazed at how many completely blank expressions he was capable of. One of the three writers should have written him out completely.
I'm not one of these snobs who says that there is no place for CGI in movies. I ain't the biggest fan of CGI, but when it's done gracefully, and with restraint, it can be pleasingly deceiving. What a filmmaker should never, ever do is blend the photography with CGI. It's a mistake, it looks tawdry, and it robs any film of any kind of class it might otherwise achieve. I know I am not the only one who is sick to death of 'impossible camera' (a trend made popular by Rob Cohen in The Fast and the Furious with those 'ignition to tailpipe' shots). I wanted the Amazing Spider-Man to take my breath away but I only ever gasped once, during Spidey's rescue of the kid in the burning car. At least the web slinging and swinging feels and looks better. There's G-Force and gravity to Spidey throwing himself into the wide-open spaces between New York's city blocks. But this is undone by bad editing. I can't tell where the real stunts end and the CGI begins, meaning the both efforts undermine each other.
Andrew Garfield is a huge improvement on Tobey Maguire, and Emma Stone was easily likable and a world away from her bitchy Zombieland persona. Plus it also stars Denis Leary, who I would pay good money to see reading Dr. Seuss. Sally Field and Martin Sheen offer good support too, though there's nothing for them to really get into.
Amazing Spider-Man tries to cram in too much, and virtually every aspect is neutered as the film charges from one scene to the next without letting anything develop organically. I'm not sure that Marc Webb, fitting surname or not, was the best choice to direct. After the gaudy excess of Raimi's unjustifiably popular trilogy this superhero really needed a bite of the cold, real world and a strong director calling the shots.
Maybe next time.