The back is just a picture of the figure posed with his lizard buddies, and mentions that the figure is “Super-Articulated”, so another kudos for that. There’s also pictured at the bottom, the two other figures in the line. For packaging, I always look to see if it’s attractive (catches the eye), if it clearly displays the figure and accessories, and tries to advertise the supposed coolness of the figure. And this does.

SCULPT – Well…it’s a giant lizard man. The figure stands at just over 7.5″ tall in a neutral pose. If you extended his legs fully (putting him at an unnatural standing pose) he goes just over 8.5″. This size seems perfect when comparing his size in the movie to other humans. The sculpt definitely gets that across.

While it’s not a perfect representation of the Lizard’s design from the movie, it gets it mostly right. Some of the proportions are off, such as the length of his arms, and the size of his head (it’s too small) to really pull off the exact look from the movie, but it still works as an action figure. Slightly disproportionate body parts are sort of irrelevant when you’re dealing with anthropomorphic lizards. Despite that, what is sculpted looks really good. You look at this guy and you feel like if you touched him he’d actually feel like a lizard. He’s got scales and wrinkles all over his body that look fantastic. His hands are in an open clawing position, which is great for action poses, but he should also be able to grab Spider-Man and look like he’s going to throw him, so that’s cool too.

Aside from the size, his head looks good too. You can still see the movie design in there. His tail looks great too, and is very long. They got away with this by packing it not attached to the figure to still keep room for it in the package. It pops on easily and stays on.

PAINT – Now this is one area where this figure shines. The paint job is phenomenal. It would have been really easy for Hasbro to go cheap on the paint apps, but they knocked it out of the park. He’s airbrushed head to toe in various shades of green, with his belly and neck area painted an almost yellow-tan color. It all blends very well to give off a realistic lizard skin look. There are so many shades of green in different areas, it’s hard to pinpoint one area to talk about. I’m not sure if the Lizard in the movie looked exactly like this, but I really don’t care. As a figure, it works great. And his head is painted great too. No bleeding on the eyes, the pupils are aligned right, and there’s no bleeding on the teeth or tongue either.

ARTICULATION – Aside from wanting to build up my movie Spider-Man rogues gallery, this is the reason I bought this figure as opposed to the Marvel Select version. He’s definitely super articulated. Some of his joints are atypical, so I’ll do my best to describe them.

He has a ball jointed neck, that does have a rotating disc, so it allows for great up and down movement, as well as side-to-side. His entire neck is on a hinge sitting on his shoulders, that allows you to lean his entire neck and head forward or backward. He has ball jointed shoudlers, bicep swivels, double elbows, wrist rotators, a mid-torso floating joint that allows for side-to-side and back and forth tilting, as well as allows him to rotate. He has ball jointed hips, thigh swivels at the hips, double knees, swivel-hinged ankles, and his tail is hinged where it meets the backside, allowing to tilt up or down, and you can rotate it there too.

See what I mean? That took some describing. So yes, he’s insanely articulated. Every joint works great and allows for a large number of poses. You can’t tilt his head back at the neck as far as I would have liked, but that neck hinge at the bottom compensates for it. His mid-torso joint has some great range too. You can really add to the dynamic poses with how well you can tilt him in any direction you want.

I also wanted to note a couple of things here. One, his hips are at a 90 degree angle. I love this. Hasbro, for so long, has been attaching their ball jointed hips inside the pelvis at a 45 degree angle, making it incredibly awkward to move the hips and legs into certain positions. With the hips sitting in at a 90 degree angle, it’s incredibly easy to spread his legs out, or move them forward or backward. This is awesome. Secondly, I wanted to mention that if you have him in any kind of neutral standing pose, you’ll need to position his tail down for balance. You can somewhat get him to stand on his just his feet, but for stability’s sake, use the tail to balance him. It doesn’t really detract from the figure though. That’s what his tail would be for in real life anyway.

ACCESSORIES – Lizard comes packed with three “reptile sidekicks” as advertised on the package, and a figure display stand that looks like the ones that came with the 6″ Avengers figure, just sans the Avengers logo. I really like the look of his little buddies. It was completely unexpected to get anything like this with the figure, so it was a very nice surprise. I know the big one in the back is an iguana, but I really don’t know about the other two. The tan one on the right looks like some sort of desert themed gecko, and the one on the left looks like a flat tailed horned lizard, but I could be wrong on those. If anyone knows for sure, let me know.

At any rate, they look really cool, and have the same kind of detail put into them as has been done with Lizard himself. They should make for some fun (or funny) posing opportunities, with Lizard siccing them on Spidey. It would have been cool to get some canisters of that gas he used in the movie to turn people into lizards, or maybe the bag that straps around him that carried it, but I don’t care much. Some fans will have wanted him to come with a lab coat, and I can understand that. Again, I don’t really care. He didn’t wear it very long in the movie, and if he were to start fighting, I’d imagine he’d take it off anyway to make maneuvering easier.

FUN – Regardless of my thoughts on the movie, I have to admit that Lizard is really fun. I’ve always been a sucker for well articulated figures, so much so that it’s caused me to buy a figure solely for that reason, even if I wasn’t familiar with or didn’t care about the characters (damn you Revoltech). But I digress. Lizard is a lot of fun. He fits in great with 6″ figures. And looks awesome fighting Spidey. I have him posed with the Spider-Man 2 action figure of Spider-Man, as opposed to the new one, because I wanted to see how well they looked togehter, and I’m quite pleased. If anyone else out there was wondering, there you go. If you wanted to start your own movie version of Spider-Man’s rogues, he should look great next to Green Goblin, Doc Ock, Sandman, and Venom.

OVERALL – The figure is not perfect by any means, but it’s really good. The proportions are off, and while the paint job looks incredibly good, I don’t think it’s 100% accurate to the movie. How much these bother you will depend on how much you care about him looking 100% like he did in the movie, versus how much you just want a really well articulated figure of the Lizard. Because that is the one area he truly shines. The articulation I think is perfect for him. They even threw in some points of articulation that I didn’t think they could even add, and it works well. Some people will no doubt think that all the articulation cuts ruins the figure, but that’s never bothered me in an action figure. Like I said, I’m an articulation junkie.

In package, the way he’s posed is so he could fit, but it results in the figure looking like a mess, with his neck tilted all the way back and his limbs looking weird. I promise you that out of the package is a different story. He looks great once you start handling him, and is a ton of fun. Whether you’re building upon your 6″ Sam Raimi Spider-Man movie collection, or just wanting to start a new one based on the new movie, this is definitely a figure you’ll want to get.

FINAL SCORE: 4 / 5

Where to buy: None of my sponsors have this figure for sale, but if you’d prefer the 7″ Marvel Select Lizard figure, here are a couple of options:

BigBadToyStore

Entertainment Earth

Amazon