The Amazing Spirderman – The Amazing waste of money

Make it or lose it, that was Sonys ultimatum. They must make a Spiderman film every couple of years or the rights go up for auction and Marvel Studios will be all over it like Captain America on a Nazi. Instead of carrying on with the costly team of Sam Raimi and Tobery Maguire they decided to ‘reboot’ the series with a fresh start. You wouldn’t ‘reboot’ Schindlers List, but we live in a world where films follow one set of rules and comic book films follow another. You can tell the same story in the same style with miniscule variations and zero new imagination. This is not filmmaking, shame on you Sony. This is one of the most cowardly films of all time. Nolans Batmans approached the character from a different angle and are most definitely a different story to Burton and Schumachers films. With Spiderman Sony have stuck their fingers up at cinema goers, give them more of the same and those idiots will pay for it.

I went into this optimistic, I enjoyed Raimis Spiderman films but was aware of their shortcomings. In the hands of Marc Webb (500 Days of Summer) this could be a whole new adventure with some genuine raw superhero emotion. Webb does what Sony want him to do fine, why he signed up to make this I’ll never know (well maybe the barrels of cash). Looking at what he’s created he cannot possibly feel any sense of accomplishment, this is not his film. He slyly injects small aspects of his own style, hot chocolate conversations and indie soundtrack, but it’s little and far between, everything in between may as well have been made by ‘generic superhero film director guy’.

Andrew Garfield (The Social Network) plays hi-school outcast Peter Parker. Why he’s an outcast we don’t know, not a pimple in sight and a healthy head of hair on a skateboard he is anything but. Investigating his parents mysterious disappearances he finds himself at the headquarters of OsCorp, home of one armed scientist Curt Connors and his genetically modified experiments. Wandering pointlessly into some dangerous looking but security lacking rooms Parker is bitten by an experimental spider, giving him super human abilities. Luckily he has cause Connors has since turned himself into a giant lizard intent on experimenting on the entire population of New York. Add to the mix a school bully, his pestering Aunt and Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) whose dad happens to be the head of New York City police intent on tracking down this mysterious ‘Spiderman’.

Let’s get it out of the way first. The Lizard. Awful. One of the dullest bad guys ever to grace our screens. Rhys Ifans does what he can but this is as dull and boring as bad guys get. Will someone please approach the bad guy plot from a new perspective because this is getting ridiculous. Give them a new angle, a new structure, break the mould please! Likewise Garfield is fine as Spiderman but there is no sense of adventure in him discovering his abilities, making it very hard to root for the guy. We know he’ll survive for a sequel so there’s never any real peril. Garfield plays well against Stone but it feels like it’s from a different film and this plot never intertwines well with the Spiderman versus Lizard plot. He’s old too making the point of a ‘reboot’ confusing. By the time the sequel is made he’ll be in his thirties and the hi-school plot well and truly exhausted. What then? A re-reboot?

The biggest disappointment of all is in the style and tone of the film. Raimis were firmly New York films, Webbs take acknowledges New York but tries to keep it as generic a city as possible, meaning like the recent Avengers film there is never any feel for the location or its inhabitants and the threat their under. He directs the action almost identical to Raimi, nothing new in the web swings and jumps. Spiderman moves as he always did. Unique it is not.

If you haven’t seen the film from ten years ago this will be a fun two hours, but for anybody else this is nothing new. There will be sequels and hopefully then they might change the formula, but for now this is nothing more than a pointless waste of money.

1 out of 5

Abrahim Lincoln: Vampire Hunter – a lot less fun than it sounds

It’s a bad sign when a couple of hours after seeing a film you see the films poster at a bus stop and think to yourself ‘Hmm, wonder if it’s worth a watch?’. That’s exactly how it was for me and ‘Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter’ a film that occupied my mind on the simplest level for two hours then was discarded from my memory in two seconds. This could have been a lot of silly fun but instead half the film crew seem to be making a comedy (which given the title it should be) and the other half are hell-bent on making it a serious tale of the great man himself. Both fail, along with everyone else involved making our two hours spent with the sixteenth president quite joyless.

Yes I know, given the title what was I expecting? I was very aware of the ridiculous story I was about to see but had fingers crossed it would have the silly joy of Evil Dead II or The Cabin in the Woods. Personally I think the premise is great, taking one of the most beloved American Presidents and putting a spin on his real occupation sounded like fun. I expected over the top action and gore, witty one liners and a whole lot of cheese, disappointingly I got boring acting, TV Soap grade direction and a ridiculous scene with a fork.

Abrahim Lincoln (Benjamin Walker) is a young man in pre-civil war America with a dislike of slavery and the man who killed his mother. While trying to seek revenge he stumbles upon Americas hidden vampire secret and is soon whisked away to be trained by vampire hunter extraordinaire Henry Sturgess (Dominic Cooper). Lincoln can’t sit still though and before Dominic can stop him he is President of America fighting both the Confederate and an army of vampires.

Director Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted) has a reputation for flashy action and he puts a lot of this on show but it never excites. It is never believable due to the story, the over the top direction and a dreadfully boring performance from Walker as Lincoln. As soon as the action stops it gets even worse, with Bekmambetov lighting every scene as if it were a Werthers Original commercial and making sure every scene is short so we don’t get bored. At times the entire film feels like a montage the scenes are cut so short.

I wish there was something to redeem this but honestly there is nothing, not one line, one punch, one axe-swing that is worth seeing. Forget about it.

1 out of 5