The Amazing Spider-Man zips viewers through plenty of vertigo-inducing action and conjures a fearsome 9-foot freak straight out of a ’60s Japanese horror flick, but all that expensive spectacle would matter little if we didn’t care about the guy inside the Spidey suit.
Luckily, that guy is Andrew Garfield. Lanky, limber and funny, the ace British actor and director Marc Webb clearly understand a fundamental truth about superhero wish fulfillment: Before the costumed crime-fighter takes flight with spectacular feats of heroism, you’ve got to get viewers on board with a character that seems to have at least one clumsy foot planted in the real world.
For this hero’s journey, the road to Spider-Man’s death-defying acrobatics is deftly paved with the geeky charms of his socially awkward alter ego Peter Parker, a tormented teen science geek who’s able to leap complicated equations with a single bound long before a lab accident leaves him with sticky appendages and an uncanny spider-sense.
(Spoiler alert: Minor plot points follow.)
The setup for this origins story: Raised by kindly Uncle Ben (played by Martin Sheen) and Aunt May (Sally Field), Peter Parker discovers secret research in a briefcase belonging to his scientist father, who vanished years earlier. Some quick web searches lead the bullied teen to the laboratory of Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans). An expert in cross-species genetics, the one-armed Oscorp Industries scientist injects test subjects with reptile genes designed to regenerate amputated limbs.
Elsewhere in the Oscorp complex, a swarm of mutant spiders spin fantastically strong webs. After finagling his way into the secret lab, Parker gets bitten, and soon develops the strange powers that lead him on the path of costumed vigilantism.
As in the Tobey Maguire/Sam Raimi Spider-Man movie trilogy that swung onto movie screens a decade ago, Spidey’s crime-fighting agenda gets complicated by a romantic entanglement, this time with self-assured classmate Gwen Stacy (played by husky-voiced 25-year-old Emma Stone.)
She and Garfield, 28, come across as mighty mature teenagers in the PG-13 movie, which opens Tuesday. Then again, this is a superhero fantasy, so chemistry trumps realism. Garfield’s squirmy Peter Parker sparks so convincingly with the doe-eyed Stone, it’s no surprise the two actors have become a real-life couple.
Garfield rejuvenates the Spider-Man persona by offering two qualities that rarely coexist in equal measure. First off, he can really act. Check out the Red Riding TV movie trilogy to witness the actor’s intensity as a crusading reporter, or catch him in The Social Network, where he subtly played second fiddle to Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg as the dude who got eased out of the Facebook empire.
In The Amazing Spider-Man, Garfield’s acting chops get a workout as Peter Parker blows his fuse over the long-simmering heartbreak caused by his parents’ disappearance. He grows cocky with his new powers to the point of taunting his former tormenters in a basketball humiliation scene played to perfection as everynerd revenge fantasy. The moody teen character also plumbs his own heart of darkness when he’s forced to confront the guilt caused by a lapse in moral values.
Garfield invests the role of Spider-Man with the one thing even the best actor can’t fake: intelligence.
Throughout, Garfield invests his character with the one thing even the best actor can’t fake: intelligence. Parker/Spider-Man needs a keen mind to add credibility to a pumped-up emphasis on modern technology and science rarely seen in Spidey’s previous movie incarnation. Garfield’s strong performance lends a measure of credibility to story points dealing with advanced developments in interspecies DNA splicing that lead to the film’s mutations.
Secondly, Garfield brings an unusually athletic aptitude to the role. He excelled in gymnastics as a child and uses his motor skills, honed by six months’ worth of six-days-a-week training sessions, to energize Spider-Man’s swinging charisma as a wall-climbing, ceiling-sticking, skyscraper-scaling acrobat.
As for the villain that every Spidey flick requires, Rhys’ reptilian alter ego serves up scary claws, squishy globs of flesh and a tail that functions as a human fly swatter-cum-noose. The Lizard looks like a descendant of the mutant beasts that once ran rampant through Japanese B movies, which are smartly referenced by the filmmakers themselves: After Parker breathlessly describes Dr. Connor’s outlandish transformation into a giant homicidal reptile, Dennis Leary’s skeptical police chief counters, “What do I look like, the mayor of Tokyo?”
The shrewd Amazing Spider-Man screenplay by James Vanderbilt, Alvin Sargent and original Spidey trilogy screenwriter Steve Kloves gives Garfield’s hero plenty of angst to work through, but the darker themes get leavened with humor. As Spider-Man gains confidence in his super strength, he becomes almost as adept at sarcastic wisecracking as he is at web-slinging.
Director Webb ((500) Days of Summer) smartly retools the Peter Parker legend as a 21st-century fable that leans into the future and away from the comic book vibe established in Raimi’s $3.4 billion-grossing trilogy. Where Raimi modeled his visual aesthetic on acclaimed Marvel Comics illustrator Steve Ditko’s color-saturated drawings, Webb sets a more naturalistic tone in the acting and stages the story without a trace of camp.
Webb mounts a striking production that looks downright stunning in the Imax 3-D version, but his key contribution comes in the casting. He picked Garfield for his lead, and when your movie’s called The Amazing Spider-Man, it is going to rise or fall on the shoulders of its title character.
Garfield gets it done. He’s in nearly every scene of the 2-hour, 18-minute movie, and we never get tired of watching him. That, in itself, is pretty amazing.
WIRED Andrew Garfield infuses the new Spidey with soul, humor and athletic awesomeness.
TIRED Unbelievably mature teenage characters.
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Read Underwire’s movie ratings guide. Images courtesy Columbia Pictures.
