[6.3/10] There are plenty of good ideas in *The Amazing Spider-Man*. Coming a mere five years after the ignominious conclusion of Sam Raimi’s Web-Head trilogy, director Marc Webb had to tell a new Spidey story and differentiate it from the iconic take that came before. In that, the film largely succeeds.

Peter’s love interest is Gwen Stacy rather than Mary Jane, and she and Spidey not only get together, but share their superheroic secrets almost straight away. Her father, Captain Stacy, is a major character and secondary antagonist to Spider-Man, rather than a hastily-included afterthought. The movie focuses on Peter’s status as an orphan, and how the loss of that still weighs on him, even before his uncle’s death. And it throws in a heavy dose of conspiratorial intrigue, an element never present in the prior series of films.

In short, it’s different, palpably so. Say what you will about the movie, which does deign to retell and remix Spidey’s origin story once more, but it’s more than a recapitulation of the last, successful take on the character for the silver screen. And the big swings it takes are admirable.

They’re also nigh-incoherent. I wish I could tell you what this movie is about. Take it at a wide enough lens, and the answer is the same one it usually is for Spidey -- with great power comes great responsibility. (Only we have to rephrase it in a less elegant way and try to frame it in different terms so you don’t think we’re just reheating the 2002 *Spider-Man* film’s leftovers.) But the way *TASM* dramatize the idea is muddled at best.

Is the movie about a troubled kid finding their potential? Is it about a dangerous, forbidden romance? Is it about efforts to help gone awry? Is it about the harm keeping secrets can cause? Is it corporate malfeasance taken to an extreme? Is it small acts of kindness coming back to you in bigger ways?

I can’t tell you. All of these themes are present in *The Amazing Spider-Man* and, with better execution, that would be a feature not a bug. The problem is the movie tries to service all of these points, leaping wildly from one to the other like the webslinger himself, and comes off like a story and a film borne of a dilettante-written, script-by-committee approach.

That jubledness extends to the movie’s tone. At times, *TASM* is a story of a determined young man trying to exorcise the ghosts of his past by uncovering a shadowy conspiracy involving his mother and father. At times, it’s a kitchen sink drama about a troubled youth and his concerned surrogate parents trying to keep him out of trouble and on the right path. At times, it’s an off-the-shelf, big and bombastic cape flick extravaganza. And at times, it’s a story of two cool high-schoolers having a playful romance with one another. None of these tacks is outright bad exactly (Okay, the conspiracy business feels miscalibrated from the jump), but they never fit together comfortably.

Oddly enough it’s that last one, the peculiar courtship between Peter and Gwen, that is the film’s biggest strength. The great Scott Mendelson noted *TASM* as Sony’s answer to the *Twilight* films, which were then blowing up the box office. It shows, in direct ways like a similar “Telling you what I am” confessional scene between the romantic leads, and in the way the movie is as much fueled by investment in the relationship hurdles of the central couple as it is the grander supernatural threats.

It’s to the movie’s benefit. Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone became a real life couple after their work together on these films, and their chemistry bears it out. There's bits and pieces of twee, mumbly courtship which feel of a piece with Webb’s prior work on *500 Days of Summer*. But despite the of-its-time way their flirtation and affections are presented, the playfulness, passion, and potency of their connection shines through despite the film’s many structural or tonal problems, which is a good thing considering it’s one of the cornerstones of the film. The casting directors struck gold with Stone and Garfield, and it elevates the material they’re given.

To the point, whatever problems with plot and tone *The Amazing Spider-Man* has, its main cast features a bevy of future and former Oscar contenders who bring more gravitas to the script than it could necessarily earn. Martin Sheen injects a working class earnestness into Uncle Ben. The film’s Aunt May is underserved, but Sally Field’s performance creates the illusion of more shading for the character than is really there. And Denis Leary, the least decorated among the film’s main cast, absolutely nails the role of Captain Stacy, giving him a caustic edge that makes him work as a foil for both Peter and Spider-Man, with a kindness and devotion that makes him more complicated in his opposition.

The pieces are there, at least in terms of the major players. *TASM* just can’t figure out how to use them to their highest potential, something ironic given the film’s themes (or one of them at least). Part of the problem is that, in contrast to the emotional but still very heightened reality of the Raimi films, Webb and company aim for something more grounded here. But while that works for Parkers’ domestic strife and the compelling romantic entanglement of loving a young woman whose father hates both of your guises, it’s a poor fit for the laughable hints and machinations of a vast conspiracy or the gigantic lizard rampaging through the city.

More than that, there's very little levity to the film. Peter and Gwen’s patter is cute and endearing. Uncle Ben gets one funny line about being his nephew’s probation officer. Stan Lee’s cameo as an oblivious librarian in the middle of a superpowered fight is a big laugh. And Spidey himself gets to have a little fun when toying with a carjacker. Those handful of exceptions aside, though, *The Amazing Spider-Man* is an unexpectedly dour film, very severe and serious, with little of the sense of fun or enervating bent the title character is known for.

This is also, very importantly, the Cool Spider-Man:tm:. Gone is the paradigmatic nerd-turned-buffster. In his place is a dude with elegantly disheveled hair, who mumbles sometimes, and seems like a misunderstood but soulful misfit more than a geek, and has skateboarding montages where he does parkour in an abandoned warehouse set to Coldplay songs. It’s a valid take on the character, but one that feels dissonant and jarring from Spidey’s roots, and like a transparent effort to make the central figure of the franchise more hip and dreamy to teens watching the film ten years’ after Spidey’s prior cinematic debut. This movie doesn’t want you to enjoy it so much as it wants to impress you, and make you remark at how cool and of-the-moment its young adult stars are.

I can forgive that on the altar of cinema-goer wallet-chasing. What I can’t forgive is how utterly drab and ugly this film looks. Webb and company do a few flashy shots, but they tend to be out of step with whatever’s happening at the moment. So much of the movie has a dark, washed out palette that dulls the sense but contributes to that vague aura of seriousness the film aspires to. And the fine editing, choreography, composition, and animation that fueled Raimi’s contributions have been replaced with an utter hash when it comes to the action.

Some of that's just the awful-looking CGI. I don’t know how *TASM* manages to look worse than its predecessors from the same studio on that front, but boy does it. It’s obvious and immersion-breaking when Spider-Man is CGI. Key objects in the frame like buildings and cars don't pass the visual plausibility test. And the only thing worse than The Lizard’s ugly, unremarkable design is the unconvincing way he’s placed into the “real world” of the film. He moves with no proper weight, and seems utterly out of place in almost every scene.

But maybe that's appropriate, given what a waste of a character he is here. Rhys Ifans is fine in the dual role of The Lizard/Curt Connors. Yet, he’s reduced to a combination of bog standard monologues, over-the-top paroxysms, and an array of snarls and growls. Connors’ motivations and character work are inconsistent and occluded. He’s yet another character in a Spider-Man film who seems like a fairly normal, if somewhat out of the ordinary, man, who turns capital-C crazy and evil when some random sciencey thing happens. The film aims for a sense of tragedy with him, but he’s the least interesting, most poorly developed part of the proceedings, which is no small achievement.

Despite that, I admire some of *TASM*’s big shots. Nothing comes of it, but leaning into Peter’s lingering pain over losing his parents is a worthwhile tack that Garfield makes a meal out of. Bringing Gwen over the wall on Peter’s alter ego right away makes for a compelling dynamic between them from the jump, with Gwen’s anxieties over already knowing how each day her dad leaves for work at the precinct, he might not come home coming to the fore. And those fears are commendably played out, with Captain Stacy recognizing the good in what Peter is doing, but making him promise not to involve his daughter in it, as a dying wish to the young man.

There's meat to all of this. *The Amazing Spider-Man* simply never seems to know how to cook it, or for how long. It’s a grab bag of ideas -- some well worth it, some that should have been left in the scrap heap -- that never quite go together. There's enough to build on in Peter’s relations with the Stacys alone, and in his complicated adolescence and home life.

But in the years that have passed, since the film’s debut, it’s become the forgotten middle child of the Web-Head’s cinematic adventures. And revisiting the movie, it’s easier to see why. Whatever the film’s laudable aims, it never commits to one solid idea, one core animation notion, that could justify its existence so soon after the last web-slinger flick and lodge itself in the memories of fans and skeptics. It is, instead, like the film’s protagonist himself: pulled in too many directions, trying to do too much, and not succeeding at nearly enough to feel good about it.