The Amazing Spider-Man
Fuck this movie.
Somewhere close to the boring-ass ninety minute mark of this interminable 136 minute bad decision (?) I just felt the urge. To get up and be an asshole. To Max Cady this shit. To try to get some sleep. Hell, maybe leave. In the most predictable genre in all of moviemaking, how is it possible that the average moron (me) could be at least five steps ahead of every major plot development?
The costume looks great in motion. The action sequences were adequate to good, in some cases better than the Raimi version. Super duper. Also, Spidey gets the idea of his mask from a luchador. It's the single notable contribution in this film from a minority, aside from Irfan Khan's exposition-spouting middle manager who seems to vanish from the second half of the movie. New York City has apparently gotten less diverse since Spider-Man 3.
The rest? Maybe if this film had the novelty of being the first big budget Spider-Man film, we could accept waiting about an hour to put him in the suit. But it's not, so don't fuck us around with that Massive Slice Of Ham that is Sally Field, with the funny Emma Stone playing a thankless love interest (who ends up carrying her man's orders, because), and with a moral that doesn't believe in itself.
Raimi's movies were corny, but they sincerely believed that Parker could be a good guy, and that his mistakes would bite him in the ass. Here, there are no real consequences for his SuperDickery. Even Uncle Ben's death comes with a side of Old Man Hubris that legit separates Peter from the blame. Peter "goes too far" and bullies Flash Thompson by stealing his basketball, playing Keep Away, then dunking from the foul line, destroying the glass. Pretty sure that sort of thing gets you scholarships.
Maybe it's sleepy-ass Rhys Ifans, who has no real motivation until a goofy eleventh-hour villain plot that involves biochemical weaponry that no scientist would endorse. Though he's also got an evil lizard voice inside him that instructs him on how to be evil, so that's cool. He's also got a "dying" boss with vague needs who teleports around like a supernatural weirdo. To be explained in the sequel, presumably.
Making Peter "smarter" and more interested in science works. It doesn't work, though, if you're going to have him poking around OsCorp like a scientist on the Prometheus. It doesn't work when he tries to romance Gwen by going to dinner and blindly mouthing off to her father. It doesn't work when you make him wear a hoodie to beat up every grunge rocker who looks like his Uncle's murderer in town, like this character should ever be driven by bloodlust. It doesn't work when he's a casual asshole vandal who, at one point, develops mastery over his powers in what has to be a scene echoing the dance-rage in both "Flashdances." For the record, the Peter/Flash bullying ratio is something like 3-1 in Peter's favor. Wait, who's the bully here?
Taking away the needlessness of a new Spidey origin, this movie's perfunctory pacing, slapdash craft (some 70's Italian-style ADR work here), ersatz characterizations and motivation-less action sequences is probably one of the most useless movies I'll see all year.