The Beverly Hillbillies

The Boy on the Skateboard

Back in 2012, my first reaction to *The Amazing Spider-Man* was basically, really? Tobey Maguire had barely stepped away. Sam Raimi's trilogy still felt recent enough to have fingerprints on it. The reboot looked like naked corporate impatience. Then Andrew Garfield showed up, hunched over on a skateboard, all nerves and defensive slouch, and the movie tipped its hand. It wasn't trying to remake Raimi's myth. It wanted to make Peter Parker into a bruised teenager again.

Marc Webb came to this from *500 Days of Summer*, and you can feel that background all over the movie. He isn't after operatic superhero grandeur. He gravitates toward awkward glances, stalled conversations, and the low-key misery of being young in public. When *The Amazing Spider-Man* works, it feels like a moody high-school drama that periodically has to remember the bridge scene and the monster fight are coming.



Garfield is the reason that approach mostly holds. Maguire's Peter was earnest and openly vulnerable. Garfield turns Peter into a withdrawn, prickly kid who looks like he expects the world to hit him first. He stammers, ducks eye contact, and seems forever trapped in limbs that haven't agreed on what to do yet. Even before the spider bite, his body reads as restless and off-balance. In the school corridors he hunches over behind that camera like he's already practicing invisibility. Later the mask becomes another version of the same trick: protection through performance.

The real heart of the movie, though, is Gwen Stacy. Garfield and Emma Stone have the sort of chemistry that threatens to hijack everything around it.



That hallway scene where Peter tries to ask Gwen out is still the best thing in the film. It's clumsy, halting, a little painful, and completely believable. Garfield folds himself against the lockers while Stone waits him out with that mix of nerves and amusement. Webb gives the moment room to breathe, staying with the hands that don't know where to go and the eyes that keep darting away. Peter Bradshaw nailed it in *The Guardian* when he wrote that the film "felt more like a smart romantic comedy with Super Hero elements than the other way around." That's the movie I wish the whole film had been.

Because once it has to become a superhero movie in the conventional sense, it gets shakier.

Rhys Ifans does what he can with Dr. Curt Connors, but the second he turns into the giant CGI Lizard, a lot of the movie's grounded melancholy disappears in a cloud of digital noise. The final stretch plays like studio obligation: big destruction, elastic bodies, anonymous impact. The stuff about Peter's parents and that secret subway lab doesn't help. It feels bolted on, as if the film has been ordered to promise more lore instead of trusting the small human story it already has.



I still have a soft spot for it, though. Garfield's Spider-Man never moves like a chosen one descending to save the city. He moves like a smart, angry kid running on grief, adrenaline, and bad impulses. He wipes out. He improvises. He gets carried away. That messiness gives the movie a life the franchise machinery can't quite flatten.

For all its corporate reason for existing, Webb's film keeps sneaking back toward something intimate — two kids on a fire escape, feelings they can't quite say, a hero who is more boy than icon. That tug-of-war may frustrate some people. It's also what makes this version memorable to me.