It’s not a new thing that a highly-hyped movie gets rave reviews from fanboys upon its release, and after it has sunk in they actually realize it’s not all they originally thought. I suspect it will be the same here, the reason being that I wasn’t terribly impressed – certainly from a script standpoint.
As a screenwriter there are a few things that annoy me when I catch them, and this film is rife with two of them: lucky coincidences and conveniences.
To illustrate what I mean let’s walk through the story points… (I would warn you of spoilers, but there’s not much to spoil).
Peter – who has the Spidey suit Tony Stark provided – starts off as a hapless hero with the desire to help the avengers in bigger heroics. His first “major” crime bust is when he is coincidentally situated perfectly to spot the Vulture’s thugs who happen to be robbing the bank across the street from his favorite deli.
His friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) learns about Peter’s alter ego and tries to use it as leverage to make other kids think they are cool. Ultimately this results in hottie Liz (Laura Harrier) deciding they are worthy to invite to her house party.
While at Liz’s house party, Peter goes to the roof in order to make an appearance as Spider-man, when a huge blue explosion goes off that apparently no one else sees, so Spidey runs towards it to ultimately be attacked by the Vulture. Vulture brings Spidey high in the air and drops him but luckily he falls into a lake, and luckily his suit even has a built-in air dryer, and luckily the Vulture happened to inadvertently drop one of his precious magic rocks and Spider-Man coincidentally found it.
Having placed a tracker on one of Vulture’s thugs Peter learns that they are headed to the Washington DC area, and wouldn’t you know it, but his Math wiz club, which Liz is apparently part of despite acting like she barely knew him before – is also going to Washington DC at this exact same time.
On this trip it is conveniently revealed that Ned is a computer wiz, so he helps Peter remove the tracer in his suit (so he can elude Tony Stark) and then they realize that the suit also has other Ironman-ish features that have been disabled. Ned hacks the suit enabling a bunch of enhanced features which seem overwhelming at first… but actually serve to help him.
Spidey finds himself trapped in a secure storage space, where he gets the suit to train him so he can expertly use the features. He then hacks the security panel by randomly punching in numbers, and again, conveniently gets it right eventually without sounding any alarms.
While he is doing this his math club is conveniently winning their award despite the fact that Peter is supposed to be their star member, making his absence ultimately inconsequential.
With his suit features Spidey gets the instructions he needs to rush to his friends aid as the suit informs him that the magic rock Ned is carrying is a cosmic bomb – despite the fact that none of the others exploded.
Spidey gets to the Washington monument which his friends are going up, and the suit uses a series of features to help him get to his friends in the nick of time, dispose of the bomb seconds before it explodes and save the girl he happens to have a crush on. There are so many happy coincidences in this scene alone it makes me sick but they are glossed over by high-octane action.
Peter (for reasons I can’t remember) waits until they are back in New York to apologize to Liz for bailing, and conveniently she not only completely forgives him, but agrees to be his date to homecoming because apparently no one else has asked the hottest girl in school.
Spiderman decides to interrogate a hardened criminal who apparently never learned that ratting is a bad idea in the underworld because he tips Spidey off as to where Vulture’s next big hit is – which is a ferry.
With the help of his suit’s drone he intercepts the thugs’ planned weapon sale. Coincidentally the FBI are aboard too for no explained reason, and they stupidly hold Spiderman at gunpoint. But conveniently, the Vulture, seeing this, stupidly makes a car-destroying scene that distracts the FBI and allows Spidey to escape. In the chaos the boat is cut in half which feels like a really gratuitous show of grandeur, and Spider-man does what he can to save the day, but his webbing is snapping apart, so what does he do? He does the same thing – webs each side of the ship but this time holds onto the webs so he can pose like Jesus on the cross, clearly not realizing that this will obviously have the same result. In the end it doesn’t matter because Tony as Ironman comes to the rescue and puts the ship back together.
Tony confiscates the suit “forever” because apparently he’s mad that Peter hacked it, even though if he hadn’t hacked it his friends would be dead.
Peter goes to pick up Liz and who opens the door but the Vulture… her father. Now this I did not see coming, and you know why I didn’t see it coming? Because it is such a huge coincidence that my I didn’t even think it an option at that point. While vulture drives them to the dance he figures out who Spiderman is, which is almost inconsequential at this point in the story. It doesn’t really serve any purpose except that Vulture threatens Peter and of course he doesn’t listen.
Peter, now with his homemade suit goes to chase after vulture, but one of his thugs – Shocker – is waiting for him for some reason and attacks him in the school parking lot. Spidey is almost done for when this time Ned rescues him.
Now pinched for time Spiderman does what any hero would… grand theft auto.
Yep, he steals Flash’s car – despite the fact that he admits to his friend that he has never driven before, which is perhaps why he crashes the car spectacularly. I honestly don’t know what the filmmakers were thinking here. I want to see Spider-Man swinging to chase villains.
I don’t want to see Spiderman stealing cars and driving them like a maniac endangering lives. That’s not Spiderman.
It winds up being a pointless pursuit anyway because Vulture is calmly waiting for Spiderman. Again I don’t know why. His plan this time? to topple a building on Peter and then fly away, apparently to rob Tony Stark – that’s right, this man who we know to be foolishly rich already has decided to rob the worlds leading weapons expert.
Luckily for Peter, after collapsing the building, the Vulture doesn’t bother to stick around to make sure he’s dead. Luckier still, Vulture went to a nearby billboard to sit and watch for Stark’s plane. Even luckier still, the Vulture doesn’t notice Peter escaping from the rubble and subsequently webbing onto Vulture. Even luckier still, when Vulture says to his helper that he notices some drag the person on the other end brushed it off, because you know, aerodynamics is such an imperfect science.
Spiderman attempts to thwart Vulture’s plan which leads to an absurd battle where they both survive a plane crash. Lucky for Spiderman, Vulture decides – once again – to leave him for dead and instead go after the boxes he wants to steal. Luckier still, Vulture’s wings have been damaged so he can’t get away and Spiderman has to save him from an explosion.
There is one last little jab at the audience where their “friendless friend” Michelle claims to be “MJ”. I don’t know any Spider-man fans who liked this so-called “reveal”. It felt more like a cheap trick for the sake of fan service.
Of course Tony forgives Peter and returns his suit. The end.
Now I’m not going to say the film was bad, visually it was pretty neat, but certainly not to the level the Sam Raimi ones were, and it had lot of gags. Casting wise, for the most part was good. I thought Holland was believable, Keaton was menacing. I know purists don’t like the “hot” Aunt May, but I thought it was an interesting change. However Flash was terribly cast AND terribly written. Ned was not great and not bad.
Still because of how weak the script was I have to rank this 3rd among Spider-man films after Spider-man 2 and the first Spidder-man.
Keith Dumbuck 