On Saturday night, I went to see "The Amazing Spider-Man" in the theater. I didn't know what to expect, but I saw that it was doing reasonably well on Rotten Tomatoes (73%), so I decided to give it a whirl. I typically want a movie to be over 70% on Rotten Tomatoes before I'll consider seeing it in the theater. This is the reason why I did not see "Snow White and the Huntsman" or "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" in the theater.But I digress. As I said, I didn't know what to think about "The Amazing Spider-Man" so I had relatively low expectations. And we all know, the key to a good movie watching experience is low expectations! I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. In fact, I enjoyed it more than any of the three Tobey Maguire Spider-Man flicks. I went back and forth on whether this was a 4.5 or 5 star movie...I settled on 4.5 stars. It's a notch below "Avengers", but on par with the first "Iron Man" movie.
"The Amazing Spider-Man" is a reboot of the Spider-Man franchise, and if you saw "Spider-Man 3", you know that this franchise needed a reboot. Because it's a reboot, we get a retelling of the origin story, but with a few new twists. Once Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield), discovers his calling as a hero, the movie takes off and Spidey has to face off against The Lizard and save New York City from certain doom.
The cast is much better than the original movies. Andrew Garfield is wittier and more confident as Spider-Man than Tobey Maguire ever played the character. Emma Stone plays Gwen Stacy, and is really good in the role. Some might remember Emma Stone as Wichita in "Zombieland", which is another great movie by the way. A nice addition was Denis Leary as Police Captain Stacy, Gwen's father. Leary has come a long way since doing crude comedy in the early 90s. Martin Scheen and Sally Field sort of round out the cast as Uncle Ben and Aunt May, and both are excellent as one would expect.
The biggest problem with Spider-Man is his villains are sorta lame. The Lizard is actually Dr. Curt Connors after a science experiment gone bad. Connors is played by Rhys Ifans, but in my opinion never rises to the level of the great villains (see Joker or Loki).
I'll be very interested to see where director Marc Webb takes a second movie. We are definitely set up for a second movie in this darker reboot. Hopefully the momentum from the first movie will be sustained going forward. Sadly so few super hero movies succeed with sequels, so we'll have to wait and see.
