I know you’re skeptical. Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man was last slinging webs just five years ago. Broadway’s Spider-Man started singing about webs less than two years ago. Now here comes another Spider-dude: This Andrew Garfield guy. So he’d better be really something, right? Well, as it happens, he is.
Garfield’s no younger than Maguire was when he first played Peter Parker — the slightly stir-crazy kid who gets bitten by a radioactive spider and starts climbing the walls more literally than most high-schoolers — but Garfield’s a lot more appealing, and is also one thing that Maguire kinda wasn’t. He’s convincing as a teenager.
Skinny and lanky, as if he’s just shot up three inches and is still growing into the extra height, Garfield’ s Peter Parker is a skateboarder, so suddenly having sticky fingers and toes definitely comes in handy. Superstrength, too, though you get the sense that he’d trade it for a little superconfidence around the girl he has a crush on. (Of course, supershyness has its appeal, too.)
Garfield and Emma Stone are terrific together, and they’re surrounded by performers with the acting chops to root a comic-book narrative in the real world — Sally Field and Martin Sheen as Aunt May and Uncle Ben, Rhys Ifans as a one-armed doctor who has good reason to wonder about the ability of geckos to regrow an amputated tail — not just to repair himself, but to create “a world without weakness.”
Grand plans, those, to go with a new back story about Peter’s scientist dad, plus new gadgetry for web-slinging and new subtext about abandonment issues.
