Review: ‘The Amazing Spider-Man’ Webs Unoriginality and Laziness

Whether or not we needed another origin story for Marvel’s web-slinger Spider-Man is a question as easy to answer as it is moot. No, a reboot of the Spider-Man franchise after three Sam Raimi efforts was anything but necessary. Once it came to the relaunch’s inevitability, though, the question turned from “Do we need it?” to “Will it be any good?” That answer isn’t as definite, but the dubiety for The Amazing Spider-Man may have been a foreshadowing of the film we got. Little effort in story originality and an extremely weak villain make the summer blockbuster feel like an inferior product—”product” being the operative word. The assembly line this movie came out on remembered all the key plot points. Peter Parker, played here by Andrew Garfield, is an introverted high schooler, spending as much of his days pining over classmate Gwen Stacy, played by Emma Stone, as he does avoiding bullies. When …