Amazingly Average

Rating: 5/10 (25 December 2012)

It wasn't all dark, doomy, terminally introspective and morbidly fatalistic like Nolan's Batdude exercises in bloated style over content and self-absorbed guilt-tripping. Neither was it quite as fun as Raimi's earlier initial updated comic-book take. So, it lands itself in the middle ground between the two and turns out to be...well...middling.
There are some tweaks to the back story, involving Peter Parker's parents picking a peck of pickled peppers. Or, rather, dying in suspicious circumstances linked to Oscorp. And the love interest shifts away from Mary-Jane to comic book second stringer Gwen Stacy. Andrew Garfield looks goofier than Tobey Maguire due to unfeasible teeth and has a blander and less convincing way of delivering dialogue. Rhys Ifans looks and acts like a man just there for the cash, fully realising that he's merely a villain-cipher in a sea of green screen. A lot of the time he looks as if he's going to burst out laughing at the absurdity of it all. It's not that he's bad, more that he doesn't seem to care that much and is therefore simply going through the motions and waiting for payday. Martin Sheen and Sally Field are decent enough, looking happy to still be in gainful employment, and they do lend an air of humanity and characterisation to their roles in the proceedings.
Standout for me is Emma Stone as Gwen – who is absolutely gorgeous and cute and emotionally astute. She lights up every scene she's in and never gives the impression of being contrived or fake in her performance.
Like THE AVENGERS it's a mass of CGI, which is par for the course these days. Some of it is convincing, but a lot of it looks continuously unnatural, and where THE AVENGERS had a clever sense of self-aware humour to act as a buffer against the intrusion of the SFX pulling you out of the moment, SPIDER-GUY doesn't have that same creative mindset.
I'm really getting tired of this superhero CGI stuff. I gave this a spin because it was available and I picked it up at random. It filled a viewing space, and I wouldn't have gone out of my way to see it. It is neither offensively bad nor astonishingly good - just amazingly average.