It’s impossible to watch Fast and Furious 6, now on Blu/DVD/Digital, without the tragedy of Paul Walker’s passing in mind. The experience of cinema is often enriched by the convergence of reality and drama. Such was the case of 'The Dark Knight' when seen through the lens of Heath Ledger’s performance. Here the spirit of Paul Walker shines through onto this cock-swaggering franchise, in particular this episode, highlighting the strange theme of family which unites all players at the end of this film.
Showing posts with label Action. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Action. Show all posts
Tuesday, 17 December 2013
Friday, 6 December 2013
The Hunt for Red October
In the era of the great Hollywood thrillers (the 90’s) this first Tom Clancy novel out of the gate is a superlative franchise vehicle. Clancy’s sprawling narrative is executed with precision with John McTiernan’s superb directorial flare, and remains one of the best Cold War era spy thrillers.
Monday, 21 October 2013
Captain Phillips
Paul Greengrass’ docu-realism modus operandi is in full effect in this picture, like Bloody Sunday and United 93, capturing the true-to-facts story of Somali piracy victim Richard Phillips as genre entertainment told with docu-style realism. Despite the wattage of Hanks, Captain Phillips is the lesser of these three pictures, faulted by a murky socio-political theme.
Wednesday, 9 October 2013
Gravity
Alfonso Cuaron’s desire to tell a largely single person survivalist film in space adhering to the laws of real-world physics is inspirational, but his ability to execute the impossibly complex conceptual challenge with perfection and panache makes for a rip-roaring adventure picture for the ages.
Friday, 27 September 2013
World War Z
The few dollops of remarkably sustained zombie-chaos intensity and globe-trotting cine carnage are strong enough to gloss over the narrative and conceptual deficiencies in this massive behemoth of a film.
Thursday, 25 July 2013
Night Train to Munich
Carol Reed’s WWII espionage pot boiler confidently stands as tall as any of the celebrated Hitchcock war thrillers of the era. While this picture predates his more acclaimed post war pictures, The Third Man and Odd Man Out, it sizzles with the same kind of high stakes urgency.
Monday, 3 June 2013
Star Trek Into Darkness
With the kinks worked out from the previous exposition and time travel-heavy Kirk/Spock origin story, and by staying close to the spirit of Wrath of Khan, the most action-oriented entry of the Star Trek episodes, the result is a more focused and thus clearer action sci-fi picture aimed at moderate Trek enthusiasts and summer blockbuster audiences.
Tuesday, 28 May 2013
The Last Stand
Undone by the casting of slow and wobbly Arnold Schwarzenegger, this is simply a very sad Hollywood debut for renowned and wholly inspiring Korean director Kim Je-Woon, of ‘I Saw the Devil’ fame. We only have to look to Chan-wook Park's brilliant Stoker as a superior example of a successful Asia-to-American transplant.
Thursday, 24 January 2013
Taken 2
“Listen to me very carefully” the catchphrase of sorts for Liam Neeson’s immensely successful action film alterego Bryan Mills, the security guard loner and over-protective father who finds himself embroiled in international human trafficking gangsters, serves as Neeson’s call-to-action, jumpstarting each of these pictures into the high octane, truly pleasurable everyman actioners.
Monday, 21 January 2013
Zero Dark Thirty
Kathryn Bigelow’s sprawling Bin Laden hunt picture is a spotty affair, a film sectioned off into often disjointed segments over the course of ten years only finding it’s rhythm in the final 30mins or so. The rivetting climax is a masterwork of military procedural execution, easily smoothing over the rocky 2 hours which came before it. Zero Dark Thirty thus resounds as both a conversation piece and a rip-roaring action film.
Tuesday, 8 January 2013
Dredd
Under the guidance of British filmmakers outside of the Hollywood meatgrinder there’s some excitement that the sophistication and intensity of the alterna-comic would translate better to cinema. Unfortunately good intentions go awry here, as Dredd suffers badly from dull heroes, dull villains, and an over confidence in its own cold, detached ultraviolence.
Monday, 31 December 2012
Django Unchained
Django Unchained is Tarantino at his most grisly, brutal, but also straightforward, a film made for instant satisfaction but little resonance. Tarantino’s pulp slavery-era Western is certainly in line with QT’s current fetish for grindhouse-worthy cult-cinema. While Django Unchained is more Inglourious Basterds than Death Proof, there’s a strange feeling of emptiness not present in both Kill Bill and Basterds. That said, I don’t think three hours have ever gone by faster for me in the cinema.
Thursday, 27 December 2012
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
The critical tepidness to this picture is astounding to me, the newest Hobbit film a natural extension to The Lord of the Rings trilogy is in fact a better film than any of the three original, critically acclaimed, and Oscar winning films. Peter Jackson miraculously manages to find the same pulse of the original series but hangs his startling visuals and impeccable fantasy action filmmaking skills onto a stronger and more accessible story as well as casting his characters with stronger actors./
Thursday, 29 November 2012
The Bourne Legacy
I admire Tony Gilroy’s desire to depart from the Paul Greengrass methodology, that is the hyper-intense speed-fueled filmmaking which made the last two Bourne movies so memorable. Though both films were written by Mr. Gilroy, as director he opts for a consciously morose and patient style of film. Impatient audiences expectating the Greengrass thrill ride will be uncomfortable with the languid opening act, 35 minutes or so of quiet CIA-speak between politico-heavies and the sparse action before the rip-roaring finale.
The Bourne Legacy (2012) dir. Tony Gilroy
Starring: Jeremy Renner, Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton, Stacey Keach
By Alan Bacchus
The lengthy opening act features very little action, instead establishing Jeremy Renner’s character, Aaron Cross, as another agent, like Bourne brainwashed by another black-ops mission to be a stone-cold killer. Instead of the amnesia-induced Treadstone operation, Renner is brainwashed through a series of ‘chems’ – drugs which control his emotions, temperament, intelligence and fighting skills. And while Bourne runs amuck in the previous films, Gilroy doubles back to show how the CIA wonks move to dispose of the other assassins who might just go wild like Bourne. Of course, when Renner’s character is targeted he fights back and embarks on his own globe-trotting adventure.
Cross moves from the desolate and zen-like serenity of Alaska to Washington where he saves Rachel Weisz as Mart Shearing, a chemist who supplies him with the chems, from assassination. He then moves on to Manila where he and Shearing seek out the manufacturing plant of the chems to save Cross from shutting down into death. The baddie orchestrating the action from afar is Edward Norton, commanding the action much like Straitharn in the previous films from the ultra high-tech CIA surveillance rooms at home.
On the ground Cross is missing a main foe, other than the roll call of counter-assassins that attempt to take him down. Late in the film the introduction of an Asian super-assassin, another chemically enhanced soldier, attempts to create a climactic showdown, which unfortunately materializes into nothing particularly dramatic. Gilroy and company keep the action quick and sparse, saving his energy for the final 20 minutes, a superbly choreographed motorcycle and running chase scene through the streets of Manila.
There’s no doubt Tony Gilroy’s overtooled plotting fails this film, and the potential of having this Jeremy Renner film run parallel to the previous two Matt Damon films is intriguing. Unfortunately it never works, or it is never fully realized. In fact, the brief appearances of characters from the previous films, specifically Joan Allen’s character Pamela Landy and David Straitharn’s Noah Vossen, as well as Scott Glenn, Paddy Considine, Albert Finney and Corey Johnson, only distract us from the main action.
The Bourne Legacy is not a bad film, and without knowledge or preconceptions based on the previous three films, under any other circumstances this would be a terrific stand-alone thriller. Unfortunately, we do have expectations and inevitable comparisons we can’t get out of our minds – such is the nature of tentpole sequel filmmaking. But I do believe there’s still potential for the series with Renner as the figurehead. The producers just need to engage us with the pace and intensity of the Liman/Greengrass films.
The Bourne Legacy is available on Blu-ray from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment.
***
Tuesday, 30 October 2012
Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter
The film’s demise among the glut of summer blockbuster fare is not surprising. The idea of a revisionist history story of Abe Lincoln’s alter ego as a Van Helsing-like vampire hunter playing against the historical story of the Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves should never have been elevated above B-movie production values. Thus, the amount of money spent to make this movie (reportedly $70 million) is staggering. At best this is a Bruce Campbell movie (like Bubba Ho-Tep), an effect which raises our expectations for this idiosyncratic story of alternate history to actually penetrate the mainstream. It’s not all that bad, most of it is watchable, but at the end of the day, all people will remember of this film is its failure at the box office.
Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter (2012) dir. Timur Bekmambetov
Starring: Benjamin Walker, Dominic Cooper, Rufus Sewell, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Anthony Mackie
By Alan Bacchus
There’s no doubt the mere title of this movie is intriguing, the kind of cross-pollination project screenwriters spitball and discard just for fun. Somehow this one stuck. Well, first it started with Seth Grahame-Smith’s 2010 novel, which he adapted into his own screenplay for this film. Secondly, there was the attraction of Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov, who also paired on the animated film 9. Presumably on the strength of this power pair it was a good bet for 20th Century Fox, who produced and distributed it.
At its core it’s a superhero origin story, initially introducing Lincoln as a child witnessing the murder of his mother at the mouth and fangs of a particularly nasty blood-sucking vampire. Lincoln spends the rest of his life vowing revenge against this beast of a man. Eventually finding his Jedi-mentor figure in Henry Sturges (Cooper), Lincoln learns the ways of the vampire and the skills to hunt and kill these creatures, which clandestinely have permeated America and are plotting to take over the country.
And thus, while Lincoln is building his career as a lawyer, by night he’s killing vampires one by one with his expertly wielded axe until he reaches the killer of his mother. Years later, after he become President and once again faces the threat of vampires aiding the Confederate military in the Civil War, Lincoln comes out of retirement to kick some more vampire ass in the name of American freedom.
Courageously, Burton/Bekmambetov cast a new face in the role of Lincoln with Benjamin Walker, who wears the Lincoln top hat nicely and makes a good young Lincoln in the opening half of the film. Like most superhero films the origin stories are the most intriguing, and while Grahame-Smith follows the mythological template to the letter, Walker’s fresh-faced performance and Bekmambetov’s flare with the action make it all visually stimulating.
The film loses steam in the second half with the elder President Lincoln (Walker in heavy makeup) dealing with the political ramifications of Emancipation and the Civil War. The use of the historically significant ordeal of black slaves in this uniformly pulpy material is kind of off-putting. The strong feeling of guilt watching Anthony Mackie’s Will Johnson, who becomes a target for the racist Vampire Confederates, was enough to make me uncomfortable. Bekmambetov and Grahame-Smith’s message here is trite and thus too exploitative of the issue of slavery.
But the film fails because of the lazy third act, an unmemorable action scene aboard a train, full of engorged and ridiculously unrealistic green-screen action, most of which is impossible by the laws of physics. And we don’t even get to see the assassination of Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth played out in the end – what a gyp!
**½
Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter is available on Blu-ray and DVD from 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment.
Friday, 28 September 2012
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) dir. Steven Spielberg
Starring: Harrison Ford, Kate Capshaw, Ke Huy Quan, Amrish Puri, Philip Stone
By Alan Bacchus
As we all know, the story begins before Raiders of the Lost Ark in Shanghai in 1935. The Paramount logo fades into a giant metal gong, which sounds the beginning of an elaborate Busby Berkeley style musical number featuring American singer Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw) singing “Anything Goes”. Our hero, Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford), is also in the bar making a deal for the lost remains of Nurhaci – last emperor of the Ming Dynasty. Fighting and action ensues, which finds Indy fleeing the scene with Willie Scott and Indy’s young protégé, Short Round (Ke Huy Quan). Next thing you know, they’re on a flight across the Himalayas before they’re forced to abandon the plane using only a yellow dingy for a parachute. After a rollercoaster ride down the mountain, off a cliff and through treacherous rapids they settle down and are found by a kindly old Indian man.
At the man’s village, Indy is tasked with finding a lost Sankara stone, a rock with magical powers, which Indy thinks can bring him 'fortune and glory'. The trio travel to Pankot Palace where they soon find themselves battling sword-wielding warriors, a shaman with the power to rip a man’s beating heart from his body and a young Maharaja who uses voodoo dolls to subdue his enemies. In addition to rescuing the magic stone, Indy frees the children from the village and wins the heart of the nation. Breathe.
If it’s even possible, this second entry of the series moves at a pace more blistering than Raiders. In fact, the film is one long journey from one place and event to another with no time for thought or decision making. It’s as if a supernatural force of nature is blowing Indy and his troops to the Indian village and compelling them into their mission.
Again, as with Raiders, Indy goes through a series of trials and unbelievable obstacles. There’s a greater undercurrent of evil through this journey. In Raiders it’s the physical and transparent threat of the Nazis, but in Doom the enemy isn't revealed until the middle of the film, when Mola Rum (Amrish Puri) rips the heart from the shell-shocked slave. Throw in brainwashing elixirs and enslaved children and you have a really dark and violent film.
Among the great set pieces is the fantastic opening musical number, which teased us at the thought of Spielberg revitalizing the classic Hollywood musical (it hasn't happened yet). In fact, the next scene showing the exchange of the Emperor’s remains is a wonderful sequence cleverly using the table’s ‘Lazy Susan’ for suspense (Hitchcock would have been proud). There’s a rollercoaster/theme park action scene which feels like just that – a theme park ride, and the glorious finale – the rope bridge confrontation - is shot with David Lean-like perfection.
Spielberg, Lucas and the boys certainly didn't set out to make a culturally responsible film. In fact, it's a series of egregious racial and cultural clichés and stereotypes. Is there anything vaguely close to “Chilled Monkey Brains” or “Snake Surprise” in the Indian cuisine? Has the Indian culture ever had a history of ritualistic human sacrifices? And voodoo dolls are not even in the right hemisphere. But really, who cares? The dinner scene is now a classic from the series – completely ridiculous and hilarious in its excess.
How could Temple of Doom match Raiders? It couldn't. Watch this film as pure fantasy - even more over-the-top and self-reverential than the first film - and rediscover a great adventure. Enjoy.
***½
Friday, 7 September 2012
TIFF 2012 - Motorway
Motorway (2012) dir. Soi Cheang
Starring: Anthony Wong, Shaun Yeu
By Alan Bacchus
The plotting of the good guys vs. bad guys has the same ice-cold professionalism as a Michael Mann film. There are no throwaway gags or witty one-liners here. But while Mann made a fetish of procedural details of the heist, for Cheang it's the escape that gets him hard.
To support the dozen or so chase sequences anchoring the film there is a roll call of familiar action movie plotting devices. To start, our hero (Yeu) is introduced as a hot-shot young cop, who at every turn contradicts his superiors' orders in order to exercise his love for chasing people in his police car. Partnering him is Wong's character, the grizzled veteran, not exactly days away from retirement (that cliché would too obvious), but a cop with his best days behind him who prefers to sit back and take the cautious route to policing. Of course, we eventually learn he was once like his partner, a dervish behind the wheel, but he's suffering from post-traumatic stress related to an accident in the past.
We're in Shane Black buddy cop territory here, and if it wasn't for the superlative Hong Kong slickness and supercool, this would be a tedious affair.
But it isn't. Motorway cashes in on the director's desire to simply make a car chase film that fetishizes the steel machines with Zen-like reverence. Unlike the muscular fetishness of the Fast and the Furious films, the characters' attachment to their cars in Motorway is like Chow Yun Fat to John Woo's guns - ridiculous but impressively passionate.
***
Tuesday, 7 August 2012
Total Recall
To his credit, Len Wiseman admirably creates enough of a different looking world that rarely does the Paul Verhoeven version come to mind while watching this film. He also has the basis of an unusually strong humanist theme built underneath the familiar story from the Verhoeven film. Ultimately, the picture is a merely serviceable lens-flare heavy sci-fi action film, soulless and stale, despite its strong foundation of character, theme and visual design. So what's missing between the lines? Style. A sense of cinematic authorship present in all the other notable Dick adaptations - 'Blade Runner', 'Minority Report' and the original 'Total Recall'. Even when those pictures didn't work, we admired the cinematic hand of the director.
Total Recall (2012) dir. Len Wiseman
Starring: Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale, Bryan Cranston, Bokeem Woodbine, Jessica Biel, Bill Nighy
By Alan Bacchus
Instead of a story of Earth and Mars, this film tells us about a global environmental crisis during which the world’s population has been confined to two places on Earth, Great Britain and Australia (referred to as The Colony). And instead of a 16-hour flight between countries, it’s a comparatively shorter elevator ride of sorts through the earth’s core. I have to admit that was pretty cool.
This is where Wiseman excels, creating separate but equally detailed visual worlds. The Colony is where our hero Quaid (Farrell) lives. He's a man with dreams of another life, but he's coolly steered away by his dutiful and super-hot wife, Lori (Beckinsale). Wiseman creates a neon, wet and seemingly perpetually dark world with a jigsaw puzzle of shantytowns - think Hong Kong crossed with a Brazilian Favela. There’s also the new Britain, a wealthy urban world and a jigsaw puzzle of concrete, skyscrapers and skyways.
As an assembly line factory worker building robots, we see these two worlds through Quaid’s eyes. He's a man with a failed career, continually passed over for promotions by the intellectual white collar elite, stuck in a monotonous soul-sucking job. This emotional conflict is sharply conveyed by the duality of this future world – a great thematic basis for this film.
Wiseman builds this human story into Philip K. Dick’s ultra-cool story of implanted memories and the clandestine world of espionage in which Quaid finds himself after having his brain jacked. The underrated John Cho delivers a terrific speech to Quaid as his pitch to get him to buy in, a speech which further supports the theme of duality and conveys important plotting exposition. This is a terrific scene.
From here it’s a rock ‘em sock ’em sci-fi chase picture, following the path of the Verhoeven film with enough deviations for us to forget about the original. Unfortunately, everything else here is cribbed from other people’s films. Some directors, such as Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino, can get away with it because of the value added from their own unique artistic sensibilities. But in this case Wiseman’s film just feels like cardboard cutouts.
The world of the Colony aligns too closely to the wet Asian fusion world of Ridley Scott’s LA in Blade Runner and the concrete urban world aligns itself with Steven Spielberg’s bleak vision in Minority Report. It’s not hard to see Wiseman’s motivation here. After all, both films were based on Dick novels, thus he is paying homage to the original cinematic incarnations while trying to combine both worlds into one. But Wiseman falls under his sword and the action suffers from his overly detailed designs. Whereas Scott’s and Spielberg’s chases were carefully choreographed and precise, Wiseman’s action is chaotic and too confusing in the overly complex geographical space.
And something has to be said about the implausibility of Kate Beckinsale’s character portrayed as a relentless ass-kicking Terminator-like assassin. Sure, we can applaud the notion of female empowerment here, but Wiseman has 104-lb Beckinsale going toe-to-toe with the uber-ripped hardbody of Farrell (consciously shown shirtless in the opening). This is simply not believable, even for a mindless popcorn movie. If it was Arnold Schwarzenegger on the screen, he certainly would not stand for such gross inaccuracies.
**½
Sunday, 22 July 2012
The Dark Knight Rises
Like the 30 lbs of muscle Tom Hardy apparently gained on top of an already ripped body to play the brutish Bane character, Christopher Nolan applies this mentality to every aspect of filmmaking for 'The Dark Knight Rises'. The result is a gargantuan monster of a film, a breathless and sometimes exhaustive experience.
The Dark Knight Rises (2012) dir. Christopher Nolan
Starring: Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Anne Hathaway, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Morgan Freeman
By Alan Bacchus
Both the good and the bad of this series has been spiked. The sense of the mythological pathos from Batman Begins is firmly planted back into the series, the emotional weight of everyone’s backstories (characters past and present) come to a head in grandiose fashion and the stakes are even more dangerous than some psychedelic gas or a couple of boats wired with explosives. It’s now nuclear annihilation. Unfortunately, there's also so much going on, from the nihilistic revolution that occurs throughout all of Gotham to the reconciliation of a dozen character threads, the narrative of this film can barely be contained. But Nolan's assault of cinema admirably dulls us to these deficiencies.
Every actor listed above gets his or her moment (perhaps with the exception of Mr. Freeman), usually complemented with multiple flashbacks to make sure we get the point. This results in the running time elongated to 2 hours and 45 minutes (the first two timed in at 2:20 and 2:30, respectively). But the history of the series has shown that Nolan is dissatisfied treating any character as ‘stock’. While there's perhaps one or two flashbacks too many, we have to admire his consistency of leaving no stones unturned.
Hans Zimmer’s music has been spiked as well, pulsating orchestral compositions wall to wall, which include hypnotizing bass drums, choral tenor chants and forceful string sections. Think Verdi’s Requiem and it comes close (google “Verdi Requiem Dies Arie” if you’re unaware). As an aside... can we now start talking about Hans Zimmer with the likes of John Williams, Max Steiner or Bernard Herrmann as one of the great film composers? From the elegance of The Thin Red Line to the rousing anthems of Pirates of the Caribbean, and now the Nolan films, Zimmer has reigned supreme for 15 years.
This mindset of uniform cinematic enhancement will certainly be grating for some, even me. I questioned the need for a Batplane, but everything must be topped, as these are the requirements of a sequel. And Nolan’s adherence to these genre rules is commendable.
Even when the cause-and-effect action or individual character motivations get muddied through the bloated story, the remarkable assault-like momentum of the film easily carries us over these minor bumps in the road. The last half of the picture maintains such a heightened feeling of tension and action, it’s a rush of monumental proportions.
But the reason this film works is how Nolan leaves us in the end, his chaos cleaned up as neat and tidy as possible without the agonizingly drawn out finale of Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.
***½
Tuesday, 17 July 2012
The Amazing Spider-Man
The general grumpiness of people’s attitudes toward this film is palpable. So I’m happy to champion the new take on Spider-Man as a sharply executed shift in tone from the Sam Raimi version. Director Marc Webb finds a happy medium between the brooding, deadly serious tone of Christopher Nolan’s Batman and the colourful cartoony campness of Raimi’s Spider-Man, an admirable modus operandi of comic realism, both in emotion and visual design. I eagerly anticipated future entries in this new series.
The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) dir. Marc Webb
Starring: Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Rhys Ifans, Martin Sheen, Sally Field
By Alan Bacchus
It was an almost unprecented task to reboot such a successful series, which is less than 10 years old. After all, the last Spider-Man(#3) was in made in 2007, just five years ago. The Marc Webb version apparently comes from the ‘Ultimate Universe’ series (I’m not a reader), wherein the brass at Marvel Comics rebooted a bunch of their old franchises (The Avengers included). Here we get to see the familiar story of Peter Parker but with fresh new layers, including his estrangement from his father, his tempestuous relationship with his Uncle Ben, his interest and involvement with the bio-genetical industry, which, through a spider bite, transformed him into a ‘spider-man’, a more elaborate learning curve of his powers and added spidey senses, as well as a new romantic relationship. In this case, it’s not Mary Jane (whom I suspect might come into play in a sequel) but Gwen Stacy, another bio-genetic geek who teams up with Parker to fight the irresponsible and deranged Curt Connors.
The broad strokes of the story, including Parker’s bullying and his arrogance arising from his powers to the world domination-plotting of the bioscientists, are all standard fare comic book material, but it’s Webb’s tonal adjustments that admirably allow this picture to sit proudly beside Sam Raimi's without ursurping it.
Aiding Webb greatly is Andrew Garfield, a ‘marvel‘ as Peter Parker. From The Social Network to his fine work in his British films, we all knew he could act. But Garfield arguably trumps Tobey Maguire’s dough-eyed Parker, as he feels like a relatable teenager, complex and emotional, without resorting to caricature.
Webb and his writers tease us with a new backstory involving Parker’s father and his innovations with the Oscorp bioscientists. We don’t even get to see Norman Osborn, though his presence is always there – in this case a shadowed figure pulling the strings off camera. But Webb still manages to craft an equally complex villain in Connors, an amputee who wants as much as anyone to find the missing scientific link that would enable him to regenerate his cells and grow back his arm. He’s a reluctant villain, who, through the pressures of the unseen Norman Osborn, takes a risk and tests his formula on himself. Of course, it doesn’t work and he’s transformed into a beast - a green lizard.
Webb’s action sequences are directed with the same realism and integrity he’s given to his characters. With many computer tools at his disposal Webb has exercised admirable restraint using as many organic and practical effects as possible. His spiderwebs looks like a real gooey substance, and much of his web-swinging could have been performed in real time as traditional stunts, as opposed to the overused CGI Spiderman in Raimi’s version.
At 136 minutes, the film threatens to be overlong, yet I can only admire the patience and attention Webb gives to the origin story before launching into the main action. The toughest parts of comic book storytelling are those moments when we have to be convinced that putting on a mask and a costume and fighting crime on one’s own is the right thing to do. This takes time and care.
Webb is in no hurry, and neither was I. The Amazing Spider-Man is one of those rare cases when expectations and execution match up perfectly, which, for this type of popcorn movie, makes for a thoroughly satisfying experience.
***½
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