Posted by I went into this movie very wary because the last set of Spiderman movies that came out were horrible, I didn’t enjoy The Amazing Spider man at all.
This movie opens with a video diary of the events that happened when Spiderman helped out in the Captain America vs Iron man fight, and it was a pretty endearing sequence, and it was a good way to get people sucked into the movie quickly.
Michael Keaten is the villain in the movie, and when I was reading the comics back in the day the Vulture wasn’t a villain I took too much interest in, but Michael did a great job with this role – as he usually does.
The story follows Peter going through high school being a nerd, on the decathlon team, nerdy friends, doesn’t really fit into school and your typical kid crushing on another student. It’s not Mary Jane in this movie though, it’s a girl named Liz and I actually liked her personality, sometimes love interests fall a little short in movies like this feeling a bit flat.
Peter is trying to track down an illegal weapons merchant who’s distributing weapons of massive and unknown power. They can cut through steel like it’s nothing, anti grav guns, incinerators and all sorts of very nasty shit. He’s trying to alert Iron Man to what’s going on, but he seems to busy to actually be around so Spiderman tries to take it on himself. He makes some dumb decisions and ends up in trouble a few times, but I suppose since he’s a high school student with super powers being ignored that seems plausible.
The humor worked for me for the most part in this movie, usually the jokes landed and I laughed where I was supposed to. However, there is a character in this movie who I couldn’t stand, she’s one of those people who’s a contrarian just to be a contrarian and her character felt over the top forced. She shows up to detention not because she has detention, but because she “wants to sketch people in crisis”, she spends her trip to DC complaining about oppression and a bunch of other just… unnecessary dialogue. Many times she’s supposed to be funny, but I just winced like I was watching someone belly flop into a pool.
The action sequences were well done, I really liked the scene they show in the trailer where the ship is split in half and Spiderman is trying to save it via webs knitting it back together. The scenes where he’s fighting people with those mega weapons was fun to watch, and of course the Vulture scenes had to be well done to keep the movie going, and thankfully I enjoyed those too.
I went into this movie expecting to think it was a 5/10, but was pleasantly surprised – I think I’d rate it a 7.75/10 because there were a few things that took away from the movie. Spiderman was trying to be secretive about who he is, but he’s talking about his adventures while sitting on a bleacher in gym class packed around other people – and he’s taking the super-tech weapons to school and working on them in shop class around other people. C’mon now. There were also some things that felt forced together in regards to the villain and Spiderman during the end of the movie, and I can’t talk about it too much without giving things away, but my first thought during the “reveal” was “Seriously, you couldn’t think of a more probable way to do this?”
I also really hated that fucking contrarian chick so much, 90% of the time if the humor fell flat it was one of her lines…. and my heart fucking SANK when it was revealed at the end she’s going to be a big part of the later movies. Good god, PLEASE tone her down a bit, PLEASE.
Overall it was so much better than The Amazing Spiderman, and I’d recommend people to go see it, maybe the things that bothered me won’t bother you at all and you’d enjoy it even more than I did. IMDB gives it an 8.2 which I think is fair.