This movie had a lot going against it. I didn't want to see Spidey's origin story again. It's a story that's been told, and I'm sick of origin stories. It seems like a step backward for the genre, and a cynical move by the studio to keep a cash cow franchise from dying of old age. So I was completely surprised that the movie works. It works because it lets its actors work. The superheroics are grounded by real humans with real emotions, not the broadly drawn stereotypes that inhabited the Raimi movies.

Webb's film is certainly not as slickly constructed as the Raimi movies. There's a mysterious subplot about the mysterious death of Peter's parents that goes nowhere mysteriously. The Lizard's story feels tossed in because all superhero movies need supervillians, right? It doesn't fit organically with this version of Spidey's origin story, and probably would have been more at home in Sam Raimi's Spider-man 4. In the end, I wish the movie had bucked harder against blockbuster superhero movie tradition, but it's a move in the right direction.