Universal Truth - NO Spoilers!

Rating: 5/10 (5 July 2012)

In the words of Arthur Fonzarelli (aka The Fonz), "bull... makes the world go round". This latest installment of Spidey and the critics' and the public's reaction are all testament to how true that is. Perfect proof that corporations are greedy (why a remake? why now and why so poorly done?), critics are stupid (really Roger Ebert? because the origin story takes up an hour of screen time it is somehow "better"? you are crazy!) and the public will believe hype and has a very short term memory (really, this one has more humor or the action scenes were better than the first installments? No way in Heck!). This is a entertaining movie...I'll give it that. The origin story has a few nice new pieces to it. The bad guy is somewhat interesting. The actress playing Gwen is outstanding. Yes, all true. But while the Toby McGuire installments may not have been perfect, they had great drama, great buildup of origin story in 1st installment, the depth of the characters and the inner-turmoil they all felt was very real, and they did it while making you feel it was all believable. After watching this at no time did I ever have an emotional attachment to Spidey, I never worried that he wouldn't survive the fight scenes, and poor Sally Field and Martin Sheen just over act themselves out of such a small role. All this is testament to how well done those Toby McGuire movies were (admittedly the 3rd movie was very poor on many levels but it still had humor and depth of characters). This version is more Nickelodeon or MTV after school special. Interesting enough to watch but they scaled down the good stuff to focus on high-school romance and drama and the whole concept suffers. If you find yourself enjoying this, don't be fooled by our society's epidemic of short attention span an lack of memory for important things from the past...go back and revisit Spiderman 1 and 2 and see what a REAL comic book superhero movie could be.