The Amazing Spider-Man: The Bleeding Cool Review

Here’s a little-known fact. As a reviewer, you’re always secretly hoping for the film you’re seeing to stink. Really bad films are a gift for a writer who wants to just riff on silly dialogue and shonky effects and questionable continuity. A real hatchet job can leave a movie reviewer feeling like they’re the funniest guy (or lady) alive.

Second prize is a film that’s flat-out awesome. Sure it’s a drag thumbing through the thesaurus hunting down new synonyms for ‘spiffy’ but still…you’ve just seen a great movie. What’s not to love about that?

The ones us movie review guys really hate are films that are just ‘fine’. If a movie doesn’t conspicuously reek, but doesn’t absolutely rock either, a writer has to work hard to make his review interesting.

I’m going to have to work pretty hard on this one

A lot of the early gossip I heard on The Amazing Spider-man, from colleagues who had attended the first screenings, suggested it was a very poor show indeed. I don’t see it that way. The Amazing Spider-Man comes across to me as one of those flicks that would have picked up some great reviews before Christopher Nolan and Joss Whedon came along and raised the superhero movie bar, ruining everybody else’s fun.

A couple of embargo-busting UK newspapers ran absolutely ecstatic reviews of this film. I don’t quite get what those writers saw in this movie either. There’s a long list of things that Marc Webb got right, but I can think of a few major elements that were very poorly handled indeed.

For example: There’s a kind of X-Files conspiracy plot that launches Peter Parker’s life, and indeed this rebooted Spidey franchise, into a new direction. After a little while though it’s more or less forgotten, presumably to be wrapped up at the end of the expected Spider-man trilogy.

The creature design for The Lizard is…well….meh. They’ve given him a weird ‘Jack Nicholson as The Joker’ mouth that doesn’t in any way seem natural with Rhys Ifans’s voice coming out of it. And this is one talky lizard.

..and at a pivotal point in the film Peter Parker Googles his (missing) Dad to find out a whole lot of crucial plot points. He’s seventeen years old. He didn’t think of that  before? Ever?.