BOTTOM LINE:
If there is such a thing as a throwback comic book movie (and not in the way that Captain America: First Avenger is a throwback to WWII films), The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is it. It doesn’t try to mimic Marvel Studios and insert comic book characters into a specific sub-genre of action (e.g., Captain America in a political thriller) nor does it worship at the almighty altar of Christopher Nolan. Instead, it’s cinematic touchstones are Jon Favreau’s Iron Man 2, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy, Richard Donner’s two Superman films, and even, to a smaller degree, Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever. Sometimes it manages to pull off its unabashed comic book storytelling due to winning performances from Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, and Sally Field, and several dazzling action scenes that are pure fun. However, the tone jumps all over the place, there are too many villains/too little motivation, an overabundance of plot, and a corporate-driven need to set up not just sequels but at least one spin-off. The result is something which at its best frequently threatens to turn into a truly amazing Spider-Man movie, and at its worst is truly regrettable.
THE REVIEW
The obituary for The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was written long ago, adding new paragraphs with each new publicity photo (e.g, “Jaimie Foxx’s hair looks so silly!”) and theatrical trailer, the first of which featured special effects practically lifted straight out of The Amazing Spider-Man Playstation 3 video game. The cast list just seemed to continue to grow, with comic book characters Mary Jane Watson, Felicia “Black Cat” Hardy, Adrian “Vulture” Toomes, Norman “Green Goblin” Osborn, Harry “Hob Goblin” Osborn, Electro, and Rhino all set to join Peter Parker and Gwen Stacey. Plus, from the outside looking in it came off as an astonishingly poorly managed franchise. Why? When the studio (Sony) officially announces a release date for not just Amazing Spider-Man 3 but also Amazing Spider-Man 4 it looks bad when the director (Marc Webb) and star (Andrew Garfield) reveal in subsequent interviews they first heard about Spider-Man 4 at the same time we did. So, fans’ spidey senses got to tingling since Amazing Spider-Man 2 (subtitled Age of Electro in some territories) was shaping up to to be a Spider-Man 3-like disaster of creative overreach.
We’re like spurned lovers who’ve let Spider-Man back in our lives, but we’re always worried we’ll get burned again as we did with Spider-Man 3
Well, go rip up the obituary. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is NOT a franchise killer. In fact, despite suffering in all the expected ways it still packs a fair amount of fun into its lengthy two and a half hours. It’s the type of comic book movie my 6-year-old nephew would likely enjoy a fair deal more than me just the same way I used to enjoy Batman Forever far more as a kid than I do now.
BASIC PLOT DESCRIPTION – MINOR SPOILERS
After a rather shaky prologue sequence depicting what exactly became of Peter Parker’s parents when he was a kid (did we need to find out Peter’s dad could go all Harrison Ford in Air Force One on bad guys when threatened?), the film begins proper with Spider-Man swinging to his absolute heart’s delight across the Manhattan skyline. Gone are Amazing Spider-Man 1′s widely reviled video game-like POV shots, with us instead watching Spider-Man from behind or just over his shoulder instead literally straight through his eyes. He thwarts a heist headed by a tattoed, Russian baddie named Aleksei Sytsevich (Paul Giamatti, who is playing it as big and cartoonish as possible, his accent reminding many of The Underminer in The Incredibles). Along the way, Spider-Man saves sadsack Oscorp-employee Max Dillon (Jamie Foxx) from getting hit by a car, thus unwittingly creating a superfan, and manages to make it back to his high school graduation in time.
Max Dillon is to Spider-Man in this movie what the Riddler was to Bruce Wayne in Batman Forever
While Parker and Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) have been dating since the last film, they break up rather quickly here, with Parker’s guilt over going against her father’s wishes and NOT staying away from her being too big of a barrier. The story then jumps ahead a year, and at this point the rest of the movie is pretty much all in the various trailers and TV spots. Seriously, you won’t realize it until you see the movie, but the last 30-seconds to 1-minute of Amazing Spider-Man 2 has already been shown ad nauseum in Sony’s relentless advertising.
As with the trailers, much of the screen time is devoted to the origin stories for the villains. Max Dillon goes all blue and lightnin-y after a lab accident with experimental electric eels, and decides to take it out on Spider-Man because…well, because shut up, that’s why. Dane DeHaan’s Harry Osborn goes all green since his father, Norman (Chris Cooper), never bothered to tell him he had a hereditary degenerative, ultimately fatal condition, and the experimental drug he takes has Goblin-shaped consequences. Plus, if you thought Giamatti’s over-the-top-and-then-some take on Rhino could be contained to just that opening scene you’d be mistaken. There are also multiple supporting characters (Colm Feore’s Adrian Toomes, Felicity Jones’ Felicia Hardy) who are mostly just around so that they might evolve to become the likes of Vulture and Black Cat in future films.
END BASIC PLOT DESCRIPTION
Feore and Jones honestly barely register at all, and Giamatti also seems set up for an expanded role later on down the line. Heck, we could even see more of Martin Csokas’ Dr. Kafka, who rivals only Giamatti in the over-the-top department as a Oscorp scientist who likes his experiments just a little too much and talks like an even more exaggerated of the already exaggerated Dr. Strangelove. Some may get a kick out of his camp charms, but it felt a little too big to me, even in a movie as comic book-y as this one.
So, Foxx and DeHaan get the real heavy lifting, and it’s odd how their performances are kind of opposites. Foxx’s geeky version of Max Dillon is so broad that even The Big Bang Theory would beg for a little more nuance (one very quick fantasy sequence he has feels like it comes from an entirely different movie), but the moment he becomes Electro he is able to effectively channel the character’s confusion, frustration, and eventually white hot rage. It’s so unfortunate that they so thoroughly drop the ball on the character before that point because if we cared about Max Dillon at all we might be interested in Electro’s menace. The special effects for him are fantastic, but based upon the script I’m not sure anyone could have done anything to make this character really work.
DeHaan, on the other hand, manages the impossible by taking the literally only 3 scenes he has with Peter Parker, and makes us believe these two were childhood friends with the camaraderie afforded years of shared experiences but sadness resulting from having been separated for so long since Osborn had been shipped away to a boarding school. It’s when DeHaan reaches full villain stage that his performance kind of falls apart, similarly hindered like Foxx by an impossibly rushed motivation for why he’s a villain at all. DeHaan is really just doing a riff on his Chronicle character throughout all of Spider-Man 2, but it’s when they put him under make-up that he oddly loses his edge.
Sadly, with so much time being used to set up and pay off Electro and Goblin, the franchise’s absolute strongest asset, the chemistry between Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone, is probably left slightly undeserved.
Look at those two-they’re adorable!
That’s not to say the scenes they do have together are disappointing. Far from it. One conversation they have about the things each of them will need to stop doing so that they can remain friends and not give in to romantic temptation (e.g., Gwen’s laugh really does it for Peter, apparently) is a particular delight. It’s more that you might be surprised at how little screen time they share together, and find yourself imagining a stronger version of this film which dropped Electro or Goblin completely and shifted some of that screen time to the central couple of the story. Garfield and Stone’s performances are incredibly enjoyable, although if I’m honest I still don’t love the way Garfield quips and jokes while he’s Spider-Man.
Although it’s more in keeping with the comics than the Raimi films, Garfield’s quips sometimes come off as slightly cocky or just plain annoying, though likely better than Maguire’s quips as Spider-Man
It’s not just the villains gobbling up air time. Technically, the first Amazing Spider-Man was an origin story which only partially finished its own origin. This leaves it up to Amazing Spider-Man 2 to answer the question of what became of Peter’s parents and what the heck was going on with ASM 1‘s closing credits sequence with the mysterious man questioning Dr. Connors about whether or not he told Peter about his father. Screenwriters Alex Kurtzman, Robert Orci, and Jeff Pinkner, all three of whom are new to the Spider-Man franchise, do their best to provide resolution here, somewhat effectively using Peter’s search for answers to parallel him to Harry and (to a lesser degree) Gwen as orphaned children of absentee parents (although Gwen still has her mom, not that we ever really see her though). However, this ultimately feels like a story which should have either never been introduced in the first place, as Peter obtaining his powers via some corporate conspiracy involving his father sort of negates the notion of Spider-Man as an every-man, or resolved in the first film so the sequel wouldn’t have to frequently stop all forward moment and zig to the right so that Peter can think about his dad again.
Like so much with Amazing Spider-Man 2, you can’t completely dismiss this, though, because it does result in a gorgeous scene with Andrew Garfield and Sally Field, who is not as present as much as she was in the first film but hits all of her scenes out of the park.
Rosemary Harris always felt more like Peter Parker’s kindly grandma in the Raimi films whereas Field legitimately feels like the woman who raised Peter Parker in the ASM film universe.
In general, the human drama and relationship beats are more in director Marc Webb’s wheelhouse, although he has improved considerably as an action helmer since ASM 1, finally delivering his first real standout action moment with Spidey and Electro’s Times Square fight. He is using a lot of the same tricks as Sam Raimi, but the technology has improved enough that they look so much better now than they did a decade ago. Like Raimi, Webb seems to let his enthusiasm get the better of him on occasion, and the transitions between scenes are not always as seamless as they should be, although he never resorts to old timey screen wipes and dissolves like Raimi did to distract us. Partially because the script is all over the place, Webb lets the tone of the film shift wildly, and if some of the performances are probably a little too big it’s his fault for not reigning those actors in.
The musical score is an odd collaboration between Hans Zimmer, Johnny Marr and Pharrell Williams, the latter two’s work most likely being heard underneath the slightly less traditional score associated with Electro throughout the film. Occasionally, actual songs with lyrics pop up, but the meat of the score is a very traditional comic book movie theme from Zimmer, which is effective but won’t make us forget Danny Elfman’s iconic scores for the Raimi films anytime soon.
Lastly, if you are somewhere where they will be showing the X-Men: Days of Future Past scene during the credits it’s not worth the wait. Imagine a scene flying at you with absolutely no context, and not even particularly cool action. That’s pretty much what it is.
ROTTEN TOMATOES‘ CURRENT CONSENSUS
55% Fresh Rating: “While the cast is outstanding and the special effects are top-notch, the latest installment of the Spidey saga suffers from an unfocused narrative and an overabundance of characters.”
THE TRAILER
What did you think? Like it? Hate it? Let us know in the comments section.
Second Opinions
- Movie Review: The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (soipondered.wordpress.com)
- Amazing Spider-Man 2 Review (wegotthiscovered.com)
