Movie Deja Vu! No, not the one with Denzel traveling four days into the past. I'm talking about that other Spider-Man movie with goofball plot devices and freaky William Dafoe as the Green Goblin. Both that Spider-Man and this Spider-Man movie tell the same story of a punk kid named Peter Parker who gets bitten by a spider and turns vigilante. The difference in this reboot is that it's actually GOOD.
The other three Spider-Man movies were directed by Sam Raimi. You may remember him from such works as Xena: Warrior Princess, or Evil Dead. Don't get me wrong, Xena was my hero, and I love Bruce Campbell. But if Sam Raimi does one thing well, that one thing would be the cheese factor, and that is best displayed in the Spider-Man series he did with Tobey Maguire. I wasn't really a fan, especially because Spider-Man is perhaps one of my least favorite superheroes. My favorite superhero is Batman, so you can imagine that cheese doesn't usually bother me, but when it's paired with Tobey Maguire, we have a problem...
In any case, The Amazing Spider-Man has resurrected the story for me. Andrew Garfield, who plays as the new Peter Parker, gives him a raw quality that is rare in superhero portrayals. He doesn't have the severity of Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne, or the rapier wit of the billionaire playboy Iron Man. Garfield came off to me as being a realistic version of Peter Parker, with angst, awkwardness, humor, and heart.
The chemistry between Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone was breathtaking! Watching the tenderness they show for each other leaked into my brain to remind me of and reaffirm the relationships I have in my life. Wow. Romantic comedies wish they could do that. Heck, The Notebook wishes it could do that, and here it is, accomplished by a superhero action movie. Go figure.
This all sounds like I was surprised about how good this movie was. Psh! I knew from the instant I saw Rhys Ifans in the trailer that this had to be worth the watch. That guy is great in everything, from Harry Potter to Notting Hill, and he did not disappoint as Dr. Curt Connors, AKA The Lizard. His performance was pretty darn good, because he imbued his character with so many redeeming qualities that if you only saw select scenes from the movie (skipping most of the violence), you might think he was a protagonist. It takes guts to play such a potentially brutal character with bald-faced sincerity, bordering on innocence. And that, my friends, is the best kind of bad guy: the kind that believes they are doing the "right" thing.
All in all, great movie! I give it five and a half strawberry lollipops, out of six total lollipops. That half a lollipop was deducted because of the ending and how it disappointed me... But you shall see for yourself, I hope! Now I can pretend those last three movies never happened. You may think this reboot is awkwardly too soon, but I say it should have bloody come first!
