Columbia Pictures
I can’t smoke pot anymore because my kids are smarter than I am. So I do it at the movies. This week: Sony’s reboot of the Spider-Man franchise with a whole new cast and crew.
I thought the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies were pretty OK. Tobey Maguire kind of creeps me out and the last one was stupid and crazy but, you know, they were pretty good. I can understand why they want new people to do them though because that was like, what, 10 years ago? Everybody’s old and Spider-Man can’t be old. Did you know that the guys who make the comic books thought Spider-Man was getting too old because he was married so they made him make a deal with Satan that took his marriage away? That’s so weird. Okay, so forget everything that happened in the last three movies, even that weird part in the jazz club with the dancing. This isn’t your Dad’s Spider-Man. If your Dad liked Tobey Maguire. Did he?
So the new Spider-Man is a British guy named Andrew Garfield. When I was at Comic-Con last year he came out of the crowd in a janky Spidey costume and gave a little speech about how much Spider-Man meant to him and it was totally corny as Hell but also kind of really cool because of this: Spider-Man is kind of not very ironic. I mean, he makes jokes all the time but he’s also pretty serious because his uncle is dead and stuff. So Garfield getting weepy about Peter Parker was a good way to start, and he’s pretty good in this movie. He’s just the right level of skinny and ungainly and it works pretty well. The action bits where he’s in costume are mostly computer, but they’re so much better than the computer from the older movies. Seriously, go back and watch those sometime. They look so bad!
Instead of a radiation spider it’s a genetic engineering spider this time, and the Big Deal with this new movie is the secret story of Peter Parker’s parents (they were spies or something in the comic) but it’s really not that interesting. The Lizard is the villain and he looks a lot better now then in the first Comic-Con footage, where he looked like the baby from that TV show Dinosaurs. “Not the mama!” That show owned.
It’s weird that the movie that got Marc Webb, the director, hired was (500) Days Of Summer, but it kind of makes sense because the best stuff here is between Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy, played by Emma Stone who is a blonde now. You know what happened when Lindsay Lohan went from being a redhead to a blonde? You do. But you know a whole movie of Awkward Teen Dating isn’t going to make a billion dollars anytime soon. The thing is though, the action and fights aren’t really – so Spider-Man-y, if that makes sense? It’s just more superhero smashing and swinging without any real personality to it.
Will I see another Spider-Man movie? Probably, I have to see a movie every week. What’s your excuse?
Disclaimer: I took out all the spelling and grammar mistakes but left in everything else.