Mind you, I don't really disagree with just about anything you said, save you having issues with it, albeit minor.

Tobey's Spiderman was the first significant standalone superhero franchise since Keaton's Batman. Tom's Spiderman was introduced as a cameo, graduated to tertiary, but is just stepping into his own.

The weight of everything that has occurred (and that he missed for 5 years) is still heavy on him. His "recently discovered he was Spiderman worry non stop Aunt" had to pack his suit for him. The doubts that plagued Tobey in S2 are on steroids for Tom, AND he's still in high school.

Those are a lot of moving parts. And in the MCU way, it's usually the heroes themselves that are the biggest obstacles, not the villains. That held true in this flick. His talk with Happy and designing of his suit kind of signaled he was going to resolve this.


However, I think the mid and post credit scenes did plenty to raise the stakes and set things forward for phase 4 of the MCU.



>Like, the cast is great. I like what they did with Mysterio.
>No *real* complaints.
>
>But nothing even *remotely* verging on a classic action scene
>or even Spider-Man moment, really. It's honestly more of an
>Iron Man movie than a Spider-Man movie in a lot of ways. I'm
>not necessarily complaining about that... but a lot of this is
>familiar and/or stakesless to the point that it all amassed to
>a bit of a shrug. And I wonder if it's because it focused *so
>much* on being funny that we lost the emotional engagement.
>
>There's no excuse with *this* cast and how great it is for
>these movies to fail to hit the heights of, say, Spider-Man 2.
>Nothing in this *sniffs* the Doc Ock action. Or the train
>sequence. Or the MJ identity reveal. Or the "Go get em, Tiger"
>at the end. Raimi understands how to stage action, and he
>understands that sometimes, to create those big emotional
>moments, you have to get earnest. Maybe even risk getting
>corny. Watts simply isn't down for that at all. So often in
>this movie, scenes that are building emotion undercut that
>emotion with one-liners or zingers or whatever.
>
>The most effective emotional scene is when Happy sees Peter
>tinkering with the armor and is reminded of Tony, because it's
>one of the very, very few scenes where they don't immediately
>hit us with a joke. I think back to the Michael Keaton car
>scene in the first Holland Spidey too: it's got humor in it,
>but the emotions are real, they aren't undercut, the threats
>are real. These movies need more of that, imo.
>
>Also, the first Mysterio illusion sequence where Spidey gets
>his ass kicked-- it starts getting actually scary, sets
>Mysterio up as a real threat, doesn't joke around. But then
>Spidey is just like, "Okay, I just have to sense where he is,"
>and then he can do it perfectly next go around. No real build,
>no real threat, no explanation beyond "I have to do it, so I
>guess I will this time." Like, as corny as the sequence is in
>Raimi's Spider-Man 2 where he summons the strength to get his
>powers to work again, at least the movie is showing us *how*
>he develops. I feel like these movies shortcut a lot of those
>steps. Maybe because Watts just isn't the same caliber
>filmmaker. Maybe they needed to show Mysterio as the bad guy
>earlier (especially since, let's be honest, we ALL knew it was
>going there, and guaranteed the majority of audiences do too),
>establish the illusion threat earlier, etc. I don't know the
>answer. I just didn't love how easy it was to beat him
>immediately after it seemed impossible to do so.
>
>Again, all this makes me seem way lower on it than I am. It
>was a fun time. But with this cast, there's *no excuse* not to
>create a classic Spider-Man movie. They've got real characters
>and the perfect cast-- so give me *real* stakes, *real*
>emotion, *real* threats, *real* classic action. So far they
>seem fairly content two movies in to create amusing,
>entertaining, but forgettable flicks.