Shame. We finally get a British superhero, and he’s a bit boring. London-born Andrew Garfield has stepped into the spandex Spidey-suit for this premature reboot of the Marvel franchise.
Director Marc Webb aims for a new realism, stripping away the brio of Sam Raimi's 2002 version with Tobey Maguire.
He also dispenses with much of the character and sass that always made this character fun. It's not Garfield's fault: he is a convincingly troubled, inarticulate Peter Parker, a springily athletic Spider-Man, and has awesome hair. His greatest enemy is the script. That, and the rather wearisome 3D.
Realism is a relative term, of course. Peter the nerd is still given great powers by a mutant spider's bite, but this time it's the tool of geneticists, not an atomic scientist's mistake. And it was the involvement of Peter's missing father in genetics that first drew him into this, um, web. That, and the charms of classmate Gwen Stacy (reliably husky Emma Stone), who like Peter is a whizzo science nerd.
Peter and Gwen, 17, are given remarkable freedom to run around the lab owned by desperate, dying plutocrat Norman Osborn, and run by Rhys Ifans's deeply suspect Dr Curt Connors. The doctor wants to regrow his missing arm using lizard DNA. Predictably, there are side effects. Ifans plays Connors in tragic-villain default mode when he's human, channelling Peter O'Toole at his most offhand. When he turns monster, there's a lot of roaring.
Webb's film is slow on plot, skimpy on character development. It takes 45 minutes for Peter's Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen) to be murdered, an hour till we see the spider suit. Then Peter goes from dorky to cocky without passing charm on the way. Brittle Gwen turns gooey the moment he turns up at school battered from fighting crime. So, chicks dig scars, right?
The "RealD 3D" is fine for the flying sequences, confusing in the fights, and gives that awful cardboard-cutout look to narrative scenes. Webb saves up most of the emotional punch for a downbeat, wet-eyed ending in which Garfield and Stone are superb. Then there's a completely nonsensical scene cueing up the inevitable sequel.
The Amazing Spider-Man is on general release from Tue 3 July.
