Movie reviews

Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.

The trend for ‘origins’ movies about comic-book superheroes continues with The Amazing Spider-Man (12A), in which high school student Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) sets out to discover why his parents abandoned him at such a young age. Bullied at school, Peter is nonetheless a bright and charming chap, although it’s his inquisitive nature that lands him in trouble when he goes exploring at a science research lab run by his father’s former partner, Dr Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans), and gets bitten by a genetically modified spider. But if it’s the spider’s venom that heightens Peter’s senses to supernatural levels, it’s a very human fatal flaw that drives him into an obsessive search for the man who killed his Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen), in the process honing his skills to become the hero we know as Spider-Man. As is the case with most of the superhero ‘origins’ movies, The Amazing Spider-Man is structurally flawed. It would be far more satisfying, dramatically and thematically, if Peter was to become Spider-Man as the movie reached its conclusion, but that would mean the Spidey antics would be kept to a minimum. Thus the movie is very much a tale of two halves, and at 136 minutes it outstays its welcome by a good 40 minutes. On the positive side, Andrew Garfield makes for a very interesting lead. Emma Stone is less convincing as Peter’s love interest, but there’s a strong supporting cast, while director Marc Webb maintains a propulsive pace throughout.

The Hunter (15A) is in many ways a mirror opposite of The Amazing Spider-Man. Willem Dafoe plays the eponymous anti-hero, Martin David, a man commissioned to travel to Tasmania to hunt down and kill a Tasmanian tiger. What gives David’s quest something of a quixotic element is the fact that the Tasmanian tiger is believed to have gone extinct during the 1930s, although locals in the remote region of Tasmania claim occasionally sightings of the semi-mythical beast. Staying with Lucy Armstrong (Frances O’Connor), whose husband went missing some months previously, after announcing such a sighting, David treks up into the hills on his lethal mission, but it’s not long before he starts to question the morality of what he plans to do. Adapted from Julia Leigh’s novel, Daniel Nettheim’s film works on a number of levels: as a brooding, claustrophobic thriller, in which the duplicitous Jack Mindy (Sam Neill) shadows David’s every move; a thoughtful commentary on the clash between environmental activism and a community’s right to earn a living; and an engrossing psychological portrait of a hired killer whose lethal instincts are blunted, his edges softened, by the need to do the right thing by a boy already harrowed by the loss of his father. Deliberately understated, the movie is nowhere spectacular — although the bleak and rugged Tasmanian uplands are hauntingly beautiful — but in its story, performances, tone and direction, it’s a very solid and enjoyable film all the way through.