Enjoyment - meet Disappointment

Rating: 7/10 (5 July 2012)

Peter Parker, on the trail of what happened to his disappeared parents, gets bitten by a spider, which lets him stick to walls: not as bad as what happens to Dr Curt Connors when he strays down the same scientific path, though. Peter has to negotiate a number of tricky obstacles in this movie - the disappearance of his parents, the death of his uncle, some fancy needlework, his new girlfriend (and her father, who wants to arrest him), school bullying, and a honking great lizard.
I should have loved this movie. Andrew Garfield is much closer to the teen Peter Parker as originally shown in Steve Ditko's pencils than Tobey Maguire was, the high school background is savoured here rather than zipped through, an intriguing mystery is placed at the centre of the movie right from the start, Curt Conners' Lizard is both sympathetic and scary, the teen romance between Peter and Gwen works, the performances are all first rate (even Sally Field, totally miscast from a physical viewpoint, is good), the action is terrific, Spidey cracks wise, and much of the CGI is superb (although I wasn't always convinced by the Lizard).
So why did I merely like this and not love it? I don't think it's because it's too soon after the first trilogy, although I think the reboot element was unnecessary: it consumes time and screws up the pacing. Much as I liked Martin Sheen, I think this story could have been told better with Uncle Ben already in the ground. Pacing is definitely part of it - there were points where the movie spent time telling me things I neither wanted or needed to know when it would have been better to have got on with the story. Talking of which, having started with a mystery - which I would have been quite happy to see pursued - this was effectively dropped pretty early on (to pop up again in a sequel, no doubt), which irritated me. In fact, this movie was clearly set up as an opener and that, too, irritated me - the Lizard plot line was resolved, but everything else wasn't (OK, so it's like the comics!).
And, while I liked the action sequences, I didn't care for the wristcam point of view, and there were places where I felt web-swinging sequences went on for far too long with no particular purposes - yes, it would take him a long time to swing from A to B, but you don't need to show every second of it.
On the other hand, it was good to see my old friend C (or C Thomas Howell as he is referred to in the credits) back in action in something other than a direct-to-video piece of Sy-Fy Channel tripe.
So, while I enjoyed it, I was also disappointed.
PS I love 3D, but a lot of the time in this film you can't tell it's in 3D even though it was filmed in 3D and isn't converted in post production.