By Pat French
I rather enjoyed Mark Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man. It had heart and a decent understanding of Peter Parker as a character. They took some creative liberties with his origin, which I thought I would hate, but it served the story well enough. There were several aspects where it improved upon Sam Raimi’s presentation of the character. For instance, Andrew Garfield is a much better Spiderman than Tobey Maguire was. He nails the jokes, looks better in the costume, and actually HAS chemistry with his romantic counterpart. On the other hand, Sam Raimi’s villains were fully realized and had much more logical schemes than the Lizard did (except for Venom, you can thank Avi Arad for that one). Ultimately, I felt that both interpretations of the character were valid, and each director succeeded in aspects where the other had fallen short.
So, having felt pretty good about the first Amazing Spider-Man, and not ferociously loyal to its predecessor, I went into the Amazing Spider-Man 2 with high hopes. I’m sad to report that I exited that cinema feeling pretty dang let down.
I will say right off the bat, that the action scenes in this movie are awesome and easily the best Spider-Man action that has ever been brought to screen. If that is literally all you care about (or enough to justify the ticket price), then you’re good. Go see this movie. If things like plot and characterization matter to you, then read on.
The movie starts out really great. After a suitably intriguing flashback of Peter’s parents, we plunge right into some spectacular web-slinging action and right into a wonderfully realized action sequence. Like the first film, this one absolutely gets the appeal of watching Spider-Man do his thing. His jokes are funny. His moves are fluid and cartoonish. He’s light-hearted rather than heavy-handed (a criticism I oft had with the Raimi films). There’s a moment where Spidey takes a call from his lady-love Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) as the action unfolds and the comedy absolutely hits.
We segue from this to more lighthearted fare: Peter and Gwen’s high school graduation. The chemistry Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone bring to these roles is subtle and sublime. Not so subtle is the film constantly reminding us that Captain Stacy is dead and made Peter promise to stay away from Gwen. People complain about the repetition of the “With great power comes great responsibility” line in the original trilogy, but this is a whole new level of repetitive-guilt-syndrome (which is a psycho-cinema disorder I’ll be lecturing on next period). Peter, suddenly crippled by this guilt, breaks up with Gwen and we segue again into a fun action montage of Spiderman doing whatever a Spider can.
And here’s where the film sort of falls apart in terms of pacing and story structure. I think a significant period of time passes during this montage, but I do not recall any sort of clues during the montage to indicate this. It’s like that montage in Captain America: The First Avenger where Cap and the Howling Commandos win World War 2 on their own, but much less clear. It only becomes clear when we get to meet Jamie Foxx’s Max Dillon/Electro. Ya’see, in that first big action scene Spidey saves Dillon, who is carrying a bunch of blueprints. After the montage Dillon mentions to his boss how Oscorp stole his idea and is using his schematics to power the whole city. Also Aunt May mentions that Peter is in College and we see that he works for the Daily Bugle at this point. Gwen is also in college, still working at Oscorp, and looking to transfer to Oxford. Harry Osborn is introduced as being 20 years old, so he would either have been older than Peter, or 2 years have passed between the high school graduation scene and Harry’s introduction. So… surely a couple months, if not a year or two, have passed, right? However long it’s been, at this point Max Dillon falls into a tank of radioactive electric eels (no joke) and becomes Electro.
Meanwhile we get a pretty decent performance from Chris Cooper as Norman Osborn while he succumbs to the final stages of Goblinitis (better than Willem Dafoe’s portrayal? Debatable, but I’d lean towards no). Norman tells his son Harry (Dane DeHaan, who is decidedly worse than James Franco) that he’s a failure, but he can have the company anyway. Oh, and Surprise son! You’ve totally got Goblinitis too! And somehow, Harry’s goblinitis is going to kill him in his 20’s even though Norman lasted into his 60’s or so. Man who wrote this crap? Oh right… Orci and Kurtzman: the geniuses behind Star Trek Into Darkness and the Transformers flicks.
I wanted so much to like this sequel, but this is definitely an example of lightning failing to strike twice (see what I did there?) Everything beyond the first few moments of the film is a pacing nightmare. We’re expected to consider Harry and Peter the best of friends after only one scene together (where it’s established that they haven’t seen each other in 8 years). Jamie Foxx and Paul Giammatti are excellent actors that are completely wasted in their roles. Electro is more of a natural disaster akin to the Hulk or Akira’s Tetsuo, than a fully realized character. Harry Osborn starts off boring, gets a little more interesting, gets REALLY silly for a minute, then spends about 5 minutes as the Green Goblin.
OK, spoiler zone approaching. Stop reading if such things will bother you.
Ok so first off, That whole “suitably intriguing” scene I mentioned with Peter’s father. That spins into a subplot that doesn’t really go anywhere. It’s not exactly a plot-hole (I imagine it will have more meaning in the third film…?) but it doesn’t serve this story at all. It’s interesting when you see it, but as you walk out of the theater you realize it had nothing to do with anything.
To complement the lack of story structure that preceded it, this movie has more endings than Return of the King. Peter has a pretty epic battle with Electro (like I said before, the action set-pieces are certainly one of the aspects where this movie excels) in a power plant. Electro has depowered the entire city and Peter must stop him to give the city it’s power back and prevent two planes from colliding. There is -of course- a ticking clock. There is -of course- a shuffle of ensemble scenes where people are dealing with the outage. When it’s over people do the obligatory stand-up, cheer, and hug maneuver (which I hope we’re still teaching our kids during safety assemblies).
When Electro is defeated Harry arrives to treat us to the first and only appearance of the Green Goblin. In the span of five minutes, Spidey and Gobs fight and Gwen Stacy dies. It’s pretty much what everyone expected to happen, and thus feels tacked on and obligatory. It’s like Orci and Kurtzmann remembered at the last minute that this was an iconic moment in Spider-Man’s history and that they should probably throw it into their nonsensical script. There’s not even an explanation for how Harry can use the Goblin Glider! In the original film, Norman developed it, so it stood to reason he’d be able to operate it, and in the third film time had passed since Harry discovered it so it made sense that he could have practiced a little. Not so in Amazing Spider-Man 2. Apparently this Harry Osborn –rich, spoiled, all of 20, and fresh off his world vacation tour- can operate the glider by pure instinct.
Anyways, Gwen dies and Andrew Garfield reminds us that he’s still a pretty great actor. And then the movie ends two more times. Once to show us Gwen’s funeral, and then 5 more months pass and they tease the Sinister Six movie (oh yeah, that’s a thing). If you’re wondering, Mysterious-Hat-Guy from the first film shows up and they still don’t reveal who he is. Oh and at the very end they remember that they promised Paul Giamatti he could be the Rhino, so we get about 3 minutes of the Rhino. It’s a really strange way to end a movie, but that’s what they did.
Rhino, by the way looks terrible. Just awful.
Oh and also, instead of a Spider-Man post-credits scene, we get about 20 seconds of what I’m assuming was just a deleted scene from X-Men: Days of Future Past. I just… I can’t even… sigh…
If you’re a Spiderman fan, or someone who watches every single super-hero movie like me, then I guess go see this. It’s not quite so bad as Daredevil or Batman and Robin. It might be worse than X-Men: The Last Stand. At the end of the day, Garfield is a good Peter Parker, and the action set-pieces are well executed. If that’s enough criteria for you, then go check out The Amazing Spider-Man 2. If not, go grab the DVD of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 and watch that instead. You can even fast-forward through the Dunst/Maguire scenes, I won’t tell anyone.
