It could never happen in London. For a start, we don't have enough skyscrapers. Peter Parker might manage a brief spin around the Gherkin or a dangle round Docklands, but there just aren't enough tall buildings inbetween. And the Metropolitan police are vaguely competent. They don't just stand around during major disasters, like the celluloid NYPD, pointing at the sky and waiting for some arachnid-boy to swing in and save the day. And our city is crawling with CCTV cameras. If Peter Parker removed his mask in London (as he does every ten minutes in Manhattan) our tabloids would have outed him in minutes.
It looked promising for the first hour or so. I was willing to suspend disbelief at a series of monumentally unlikely events, such as an escaped convict accidentally running into an experimental particle accelerator, and a contaminated alien meteorite just happening to crashland a few feet from our hero's moped. And then I noticed how improbably limited the screenplay was. Everything was happening to the same core group of five or so characters, from falling in love to falling out of buildings. The film had somehow evolved into a teenage soap opera, concentrating on a dysfunctional love triangle rather than web-slinging action.
Peter's transformation into a black-suited floppy-fringed emo-boy was less-than-convincingly handled, culminating in a cringeworthy jazz club debacle. And the finale, when it finally came, was a triumph of special effects over rational plot. Hapless Mary Jane, trapped in an improbably highly-strung taxi, seemed to be attempting to break the world record for the greatest number of consecutive free-fall plummets without ever reaching the ground. The inevitable over-sentimental conclusion even led to several members of the audience walking out before the credits rolled. I didn't think the film was quite that bad, but sadly it was nothing special. Save your money this weekend, and spend 2½ hours of your life doing something more interesting.
Incidentally, what's up with that hyphen in the film's official title? Why does Spiderman need a hyphen? Do Sony Pictures really think we might accidentally split the word a different way otherwise? I mean, surely nobody's going to accidentally pronounce the title as Spi-derman instead? ["Spy Derman 3 - return of the unlikely-named secret agent"] I think not. It's just unnecessary lowest common denominator hyphenation, for filmgoers who can't read 9-letter words without assistance. And if it's so important to spell out the obvious, perhaps several other films should be re-released with hyphenated titles. The God-father (not The Godfat-her). Reser-voir Dogs (not Re-servoir Dogs). Train-spotting (not Trains-potting). Super-man (not Su-Perman). Because everyone's assumed to be stupid these days. I des-pair.
