Poor Spider-Man. His big-screen adventures that set box-office records in the early part of the century have been dwarfed by Batman and his fellow superheroes, the Avengers. The notorious production travails of Broadway’s “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark’’ made Peter Parker’s alter ego an international laughingstock for months.
And now comes “The Amazing Spider-Man,’’ hardly awful but not coming close to living up to that adjective in the title either. Sometimes dull and mostly uninspired, it’s much less a satisfying reboot like “Batman Begins’’ than a pointless rehash in the mode of “Superman Returns.’’
It’s altogether possible that Andrew Garfield, the young British actor who was so good as Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin in “The Social Network,’’ could have made a fine Spidey/Peter Parker — he certainly looks great in costume — if he had been given a better script with something like the wit, charm and energy of the first two “Spider-Man’’ films.
Instead, he’s saddled with a slightly darker version of the original film from 10 years ago — filled with unmotivated actions and wholly arbitrary plot twists. Add a slow-as-molasses first half, choppy editing, so-so effects and a chemistry-free love story, and you’ve hardly got a recipe for fun.
The sparingly deployed 3-D in this visually lackluster film adds nothing to justify the substantial loss of brightness or the stereoscopic surcharge (and that probably goes double for IMAX).
One thing “Spider-Man’’ does have in spades is extreme predictability — something that fans of superhero movies seem to crave, if the massive grosses for the bloated and mediocre “The Avengers’’ are any indication.
Credited to three writers (Alvin Sargent is the only holdover from the first Spidey team), the script tweaks Peter Parker’s back story to kill off his mother and his scientist father in an automobile accident after they drop him off with Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen) and Aunt May (Sally Field, in a thankless paycheck gig).
Teenage nerd Peter gets his fateful bite from a genetically altered spider not at Columbia University but at a top-secret research lab run by his father’s former partner Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans) to which he and classmate Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) have remarkably unfettered access at any hour of the day or night.
Our hero develops the expected Spider-Man powers — for climbing, tangling bad guys in webs — and like his predecessor, played by Toby Maguire, agonizes about what to do with them, something that again has unfortunate consequences for Uncle Ben.
Meanwhile, Dr. Connors’ boss shows up out of nowhere and announces he’s shutting down the lab Dr. Connors had hoped would provide the biomedical technology to allow him to grow a replacement for his missing arm.
After Peter provides him with calculations worked out by his late father, Dr. Connors decides to inject himself with a serum that quickly turns him into Lizard, a giant reptile who starts throwing cars full of people off the Williamsburg Bridge. Well, I guess getting stuck in traffic will do that to you.
Fortunately, Spidey is there to catch them in his webs, though the sequence is so confusingly shot and edited that it’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on. His rescue of a youngster from a burning car certainly could have been a lot more suspenseful.
Unlike its predecessor that flirted with camp, there isn’t much in the way of humor in “The Amazing Spider-Man,” even when Denis Leary turns up as Gwen’s father (who conveniently turns out to be the police captain in charge of catching Spider-Man).
But that’s a small problem compared to the fact that giant lizards just don’t make terribly interesting villains. You would think that Sony would have learned that lesson from its flop 1998 reboot of “God-zilla,’’ which is unwisely referenced both in dialogue and visuals.
Director Marc Webb — a music-video vet whose only previous feature, the indie “(500) Days of Summer,’’ hardly prepared him for a film of this scale — picks up the pace in the second half, almost to the point of absurdity.
Why bother having Lizard disperse biochemicals that turn New Yorkers into reptiles without showing the effects in more than a minimal fashion? Why would this preposterous villain prepare an antidote in industrial quantities, except that it will come in handy later?
In a clumsy attempt to evoke the city’s support of Spider-Man as in the earlier films, there’s a big, awkwardly staged sequence in which construction workers arrange cranes to allow Spidey to swing from them. Three scenes later we see this was totally unnecessary.
None of that would matter quite so much in a more involving film — one that had scenes as memorable as the one where Maguire’s Spidey, hanging upside down, has his mask pulled down by Mary Jane Watson (who does not appear in the new version) and they kiss in the rain.
Though a few scenes were shot here, it’s laughably obvious that most of the “New York’’ exteriors for “The Amazing Spider-Man’’ were filmed on a California backlot.
The film’s geography is consistently amusing. As a native New Yorker, the biggest laughs I got were from Peter Parker riding the Q train out to his home in Forest Hills, the fire escape that runs up to Gwen’s 20th-floor apartment — and police racing up Seventh Avenue to a building that’s already been identified in a sign as being on Sixth.
lou.lumenick@nypost.com