Originally Posted by
Revolutionary_Jack
I actually think most of the performances in Raimi's movies are expressive. Because again the style of the movie is trying to synch up the 90s with the 50s and 60s in a kind of melange. Sam Raimi's Spider-Man movies aren't really trying to be completely realistic...like a lot of Raimi movies it's a little classical, i.e. 50s and 60s Hollywood where the acting style was more personality than technical range. So the actors are cast for emotional resonance. Like it matters that Tobey is laidback and earnest in his speech and behavior on screen, that Kirsten Dunst's Mary Jane brings emotional warmth and radiance in any moment she's on-screen, that Willem Dafoe always makes us uneasy when we see him (which you know given that he's Dafoe, isn't that hard).
Well I had experience being bullied growing up, within my family and outside, and it did make me a shut-in and a little repressed for the longest time (the reason I respond in lengthy messages with facts is that I am used to people picking apart stuff I say, so I always take the extra room to back up what I say), I felt Maguire's Peter spoke to that experience. But in any case, Raimi's Spider-Man, and for that matter, Spider-Man the character is not meant to be a completely accurate or realistic look at the psychology of bullying, ultimately the larger importance is to convey a story of an ordinary decent man giving extraordinary powers and duties at a young age, and Maguire as an actor was able to project those qualities, which ultimately Garfield and Holland haven't done so yet, in my view.
It was implied that he bullied Peter pretty badly, including physically, before the Spider-Bite and a lot of comics showing the early days did hint that. Like his obsession with picking on Peter in the early Lee-Ditko issues and Peter briefly contemplating Doctor Doom killing him, doesn't make sense (on his part and Peter) if it was simply mild insults. Again, the comics are ultimately about Peter growing up so the stuff about how badly Flash bullied Peter is backstory and there for you to infer but I think it was pretty bad. I think some writers downplay it on account of Flash becoming a nicer person and standup guy later on but it had to have been bad enough for that change to be that dramatic.
Tobey's Peter didn't overact either. He mostly bottles up and doesn't say anything. The one time in Spider-Man 1 and 2 that he explodes is at Uncle Ben right before he goes wrestling. Otherwise, he's really low key.
I think fundamentally this is generational more than anything. When I saw Tobey's Peter in 2002, I felt it was a restrained and nuanced performance and for me Garfield is too intense and needy as an actor while Tom Holland is just bland.
Nothing against them as performers (though I have serious doubts about Tom Holland as a leading man, I think he's fundamentally a character actor). Andrew Garfield is a capable actor. I saw him in a movie called Under the Silver Lake over the weekend (a very weird and not very successful movie but worth it if you watch it in the right mood) and Garfield's performance there isn't different from how he played Peter (there's even a shout out to Amazing Spider-Man, with the issue alluding to Conway's first clone saga) only the character he's playing is openly a s--thead as opposed to his Peter being accidental and unintentional one.