The Weak Spiderman

Rating: 3/10 (29 June 2012)

I've been a fan of Spiderman since childhood. In fact, he has been my favorite superhero. I liked Spiderman 1, 2 and 3; watched Spiderman 3 twice, despite many reviewers bashing it.
So it's natural I was waiting eagerly for The Amazing Spiderman. I was more eager because this movie was rebooting the Spiderman franchise with new cast that included Indian actor, Irfan Khan and it was getting released in India before US! Unfortunately, it turned out to be a big disappointment. It was like they didn't make a Spiderman movie, but a caricature-remake or a spoof of it. Bad script, confused and weak characters, bad direction and bad editing are some of the major flaws. Story was too bland, no spice, no excitement.
The important scenes where Peter gets bitten or hones his skills or makes his suit have been hurried and short, while the irrelevant scenes have been dragged.
Spiderman gets beaten, defeated, injured repeatedly. In fact, the audience was laughing hard on the repeated scenes of him coming home all thrashed and bruised and his aunt talking to him about it. He keeps removing his mask for just anybody and that's not very Spiderman-like.
Most action scenes were non-thrilling. In a scene where Spiderman rescues a boy from a falling and burning car, he wastes almost 5 minutes trying to convince Jack (the boy) to be brave, climb up and hold his hand. He even gives the boy his mask, but the boy doesn't follow him. So in the end he has to throw his spider-thread to pull Jack up. He could have done that already and spared us of that boredom.
It was just an example. Most encounters between the lizard-man and Spiderman were equally boring, dragged and nonsensical.
There were a lot of loose ends and missing links in the story. Like the story of Peter's parents was never shown, but the characters kept mentioning it. Dr. Ratha talks about some Mr. Osbourne, but neither the man nor his story was shown. Maybe they're keeping it for the sequel, but the confusion totally spoiled this movie. A lot of inconsistencies were there too. Sometimes things stick to Peter's hands and break by little force, sometimes they don't.
The romance between Peter/Spiderman and Gwen looked lukewarm and forced. The scene where the burglar kills Peter's uncle looked awkward and disconnected like many other scenes.
Andrew Garfield didn't look much convincing either as nerdy Peter Parker or as Spiderman. He was good in The Social Network but a disappointment in this movie. In many body-close-up shots he was bending forward apparently to hide his penis-line from showing in the tight-suit. That made the already weak Spiderman look even weaker. Since when have Hollywood actors become this bashful?
Irfan Khan appeared in just 3 short scenes. He was more like an extra. But the audience welcomed him with a bout of whistling!
Everyone seemed to be waiting anxiously for the movie to end, which ends after further boring you for some time after the defeat of the villain. So much I wish, they had made Spiderman 4 with Tobey Maguire instead of this disaster.
I might as well watch Rajnikant's Robot now