Warning: Spoilers contained herein.

We took the kids to see The Amazing Spider-Man at the midnight screening so I wouldn’t have to do a coin toss to see who got the golden ticket to see it with me at a press screening, and then I ended up not reviewing at the time because I felt pretty meh about it, and I was irritated about that. And I’ve been so buried in work this last week and over the weekend that I didn’t take time to read any reviews of it. But reading David’s glowing, ecstatic review of the film, and some of the comments on that review, made me seriously wonder if we’d even seen the same movie, so I wanted to jot down some thoughts on ASM while they’re still relatively fresh in my head.

So, okay. I know many of you really dug this version of Spider-Man, but c’mon guys. This movie has some problems. Tonally, the script nails the character of Peter Parker as the writers and (presumably) director imagined him to be, and that take on who Spidey is works very well. Much of the rest of the story, less so. It’s clumsy, sloppy. There are just problems is all over the place, believability holes — even within the context of a superhero movie based on a comic book character — you could drive a truck through. And given that the screenwriting credits here are James Vanderbilt, Alvin Sargent and Steve Kloves, I don’t know what the excuse is. Too many otherwise solid cooks spoiling the broth? Studio heads with an eye toward big bucks from the video game?

Because I can’t be the only one for whom ASM felt like they created a bunch of action scenes, outlined and paced for the inevitable video game, then told the writers to just spackle in a story around those scenes. Visually, the Peter Parker scenes and the Spidey scenes are just completely disconnected and I get that (maybe, being generous here) that was an intentional choice by director Marc Webb, but I found it very jarring. I actually quite liked the look of the Peter Parker scenes and the choices in framing some of the shots, but those video-gamey action scenes, blergh. I liked the mechanical web-shooters, but unfortunately almost every time Spidey he uses them it’s in these action scenes that I know I’m going to see 89,000 times when my kids decide to fork over their allowance for the video game.

Look, Andrew Garfield is great — actually I liked him a lot as Peter Parker. I think he’s a fantastic actor, and to the extent to which ASM does work, it’s largely on the strength of his excellent performance. Emma Stone is great as Gwen, yes. Dug her a lot. Too bad the writing doesn’t ever gel around who the hell her character is and that in many of her scenes, the writing is just lazy. I mean, c’mon, a high school student interning at a science lab dealing with biogenetics would NEVER have the access that she has. Ridiculous. Oscorp in general has such lax security it’s insulting. Even their super-duper top secret shit is easily accessible to a recalcitrant teenager. Martin Sheen and Sally Field are good, it’s nice to see them there, but I kept thinking, “Ah, that’s Martin Sheen/Sally Field” and being pulled out of those scenes by that, probably in part because both of them are playing characters they’ve played before. But Martin Sheen’s voiceover final phone message to Peter, which he reads like he’s making a speech to an audience, not, you know, leaving a voice mail for an angry, troubled, but beloved nephew? So bad. Who would leave a voice mail like that? Not even Uncle Ben. There are some things that work very well in ASM: Ben’s conversations with Peter, the dynamic of the relationship Peter has with Uncle Ben and Aunt May, the moment on the roof between Peter and Gwen, Spidey saving the kid. But then there are many more that don’t, and it’s these kind of details that kept ASM from being really great for me. Such as …

What’s really going on with Connors in this film? Connors/The Lizard is this marvelously complex villain, one who (in the comics) Spidey frequently helps to heal and then forms temporary alliances with during the times the Connors persona is in control. They’re supposed to be distinctly separate personalities, but here it’s played more that Connors is conflicted, sure, but he just really, really wants that arm back. Rhys Ifans is good given how the character is written, and he does try to add some depth, but much of the kind of beautiful and complicated frenemy relationship of Spidey and Connors, is just lost here.

Denis Leary is solid as Gwen’s dad, the no-nonsense, law-and-order police chief, but how they hell are they affording those digs in NYC on a police chief’s salary? There’s the aforementioned laughable security and the high school intern with unrealistic access and responsibility, the lame final Uncle Ben voice mail, the endless video game action sequences. And the goddamn cranes (you just can’t recreate the emotional tenor of that train scene in Spidey 2 when the passengers pass an exhausted, unconscious Spidey hand-over-hand to safety, sorry). Geez, I hated that whole bit. Again with the contrived. Feels like a video game sequence: Now you have to make Spidey swing from crane to crane to reach the tower and save Princess Peach Gwen, kids. And Jesus, Captain Stacy knows his daughter is in trouble, he lets Spidey go so he can rescue her … and then, what? He couldn’t have just sent Spidey straight to the tower in his chopper? Noticed Spidey was hurting and struggling to make it there and helped out? Why no, because we need this big crane moment. For the video game.

In a way, I found this film even more frustrating because I really did like Garfield’s portrayal of Peter Parker a lot, even if much of the rest of the film never gelled for me. I liked Garfield so much that I wanted to like the movie overall much better. Unfortunately, it’s all those little details where things weren’t clicking that made it impossible for me to say much more than, eh, it was okay. Our kids dug it, a lot. I didn’t completely hate it. That’s about as high praise as I can muster for this, and I’m very disappointed to say that. But for Garfield’s sake, I’m glad the rest of you liked it much more than I did. It’s a ballsy choice, to tackle an iconic character like this and find a way to make it your own, and to that extent, ASM does succeed.

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