Compared to the Avengers, Spidey peters out

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/07/2012 (5178 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A wholesale Spider-Man reboot seems a tad premature since only five years have gone by since Sam Raimi put the finishing touches on his own Spider-Man trilogy.

But any comic book aficionado would not be offended. After all, Marvel published several different iterations of Spider-Man simultaneously (Spider-Man; The Amazing Spider-Man; Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man; Ultimate Spider-Man, etc.)

So while Spider-Man’s personal credo is “With great power comes great responsibility,” this movie was created observing the credo of the overall Spider-Man franchise, which is: “Whatever the market will bear.”

Hence, director Marc Webb (500 Days of Summer) and a trio of heavy-hitting screenwriters (Alvin Sargent, James Vanderbilt and Steve Kloves) relaunch the Spidey origin story with Mary Jane Watson, J. Jonah Jameson and the Green Goblin nowhere in sight.

English actor Andrew Garfield is a skinnier, more geeky Peter Parker, troubled by the usual bullies, but even more troubled by the mysterious absence of his parents since he was very young.

Between science projects and beatings, Parker still has time to moon over schoolmate Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone), a smart, cute science student who also happens to be the daughter of New York top cop Capt. Stacy (Denis Leary). But when he learns his absent scientist dad (Campbell Scott) shared secret genetic research with the mysterious one-armed Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans), he is drawn to a secret research facility where he has his inevitable engagement with a radioactive spider. After a period of delirious transformation (his post-bite arrival home is a neat parody of a teen coming home stoned out of his gourd), he soon finds himself with the ability to scale walls and race over obstacles with the speed and power of an Olympian gymnast. (Just call him Peter Parkour.)

His obsession with the mystery of his father’s disappearance leads him back to the lab of Dr. Connors, whose genetic experimentation with lizards (capable of regrowing lost limbs) promises a monstrous mutation that will offer a dark parallel to Peter’s transformation into Spider-Man.

In the previous trilogy of Spider-Man movies, director Sam Raimi leavened the Spider-Man story with a working combination of heightened melodramatic style and a gently comic sensibility.

He also had the advantage of a simple theme — with great power comes great responsibility — that was especially timely in the post-9/11 milieu in which the movies were released.

Webb eschews Raimi’s more baroque style for dramatic naturalism in the scenes not involving clashing mutants. In the big action set pieces, he really tries to place the audience in Spider-Man’s tights with lots of impressive point-of-view shots as the webbed wonder (whose webs, by the way, are mechanical and not organic, a la Raimi) swings his way through the New York skyline.

This amounts to entertaining summer diversion, to be sure, with solid, albeit actorly performances all around. But Webb’s insistence on naturalism does not exactly add dramatic gravity to the story’s more outré elements. In fact, it gives short shrift to the backstory involving the murder of Peter’s Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen), which was properly treated as the defining moment of Spider-Man’s mission in Raimi’s trilogy, but is lost in the dramatic shuffle here.

Then again, Maybe Raimi’s films aren’t the ones Webb should have worried about. The Amazing Spider-Man comes on the heels of Joss Whedon’s knee-slapping, super-group super-hero movie The Avengers, which showed the audience a good time by embracing comic book convention and wringing the tastiest juice from it.

Webb’s insistence on playing Spider-Man straight results in a movie that comes off as dour and rather joyless by comparison.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca