The Amazing Spider-Man 2 Review
Director: Marc Webb
Cast Headliners: Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Dane Dehaan, Jamie Foxx
Original Release Date: May 2nd, 2014
It seems like the most famous superheroes have the most
troubled careers in the cinemas. Unlike
the stream of Avengers-related movies, Batman and Superman went through periods
of downtime and Spiderman faced his own problems. 2012’s The Amazing Spiderman
reboot faced the difficulty of having to balance starting things fresh with a new
world while also surprising the viewers.
It mostly was a success, and while it did heavily re-use from the 2002
Raimi directed first film it also brought a fresh feeling with its new younger
cast of Andrew Garfield as Peter Parker and Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy as
highlights. Lurking in the background of the movie was new content to the
Spiderman mythos, seeds for deeper meanings to the web-crawling hero. In The Amazing Spiderman 2, many of those
seeds sprout and the results are not always the best.
Spiderman/Peter Parker continues to roam around New York
City doing typical superhero antics (I must mention the great new re-design of
his costume, really being nearly perfect to the comics) which is causing
friction with both Gwen and his Aunt May (Sally Field). Once again the themes
here seem to be borrowed from the previous trilogy but luckily the relationship
between Peter and Gwen has some quality charming writing and scenes. Garfield
and Stone are the acting heart of this movie and give overarching glue to its
many other jagged and jumbled pieces.
Let’s get to those jagged and jumbled pieces. The romantic plotline is fine enough, but
when other bits of humor appear they are often very lame. What makes Garfield portray a good Spiderman
is how he brings a charisma even when wearing the costume through one-liners,
just as the hero from the comics should. But the lines here are often very
cheesy and corny and not even in a comic’s way. At times Garfield seems to be
slightly half-trying (although as just Peter Parker he continues the same
decent trend from the last film). This
is not helped by overwhelmingly annoying stereotypical characters such as the
hardly believable Aleksei Systevich(played by Paul Giamatti in what might be
the lowest point of his career) or the minor “Dr.Kafka” head of the Ravencroft
prison who reminded me of something out of a Animaniacs cartoon. There are just a lot of minor things which
makes one question why they put them into this movie.
What is a superhero movie without its bad guys
though? Don’t be deceived by the
promotion, as the Rhino well can be said to be merely a speck on the whole
film. The plot involves two supervillains for Spiderman to contend with. Jamie Foxx plays Max Dillon. Max‘s storyline is
a sad one as he is not appreciated by anyone at all because he’s kind of insane
which Foxx gives the character a very
different zany kind of depth than the characters he usually plays. An accident
transforms him into the fearsome Electro who has dangerous abilities to control
energy. He may have some wonky lines and may make dubstep music with his environment
(as I said questionable choices on director Marc Webb’s part) but those are
also good factors. The plot in ASM2 is
kind of all over the place but he is another strong point of it.
Now that other villain, and the rest of the plot, does feel
like it could have perhaps been suited to have been cut out and put in another
film, as this originally featured Mary Jane Watson and Black Cat as well.
Another new person in Peter’s life is his old childhood friend Harry Osborne,
played by Dane Dehaan. Dehaan was a brilliant choice, but there are some
awkward lines delivered by him (not his fault).
Once he assumes, non-surprisingly, the mantle of the Green Goblin he is
very laughable which is not helped by the un-convincing design which looks like
Harry has just gone through a bad hair
day. Harry is part of the plot fine enough but his transformation into the
Green Goblin is offensively late into the film. There’s also the anti-climactic resolution
the plot about Peter’s parents, which had Sony had built up to be some massive
mind-blowing mystery but in the end if one doesn’t pay close enough attention
they’ll miss the messages its trying to send.
Despite flaws with some of its characters, plot , and
dialogue there are some other bright points. The musical score by Hans Zimmer
is notably great, a rare treat for a superhero film these days which have often
sounded generic. But the score covers all kinds of genres from electronic to orchestral
; it feels very progressive. It helps
the excitement of the action sequences, which do look very cool and are fun to
watch. For better or worse the scale of the world of Spiderman has really been
dialed up for this one.
This movie is trying to do too many things at once. It
had to act as a sequel to the first, surprise audiences who have seen the first
three Spiderman movies, followup on the
origins/Peter’s parents storyline, deal
with Peter/Gwen’s relationship, introduce not one but two new villians, and
also leave hints towards the future Sinister Six/Venom movies. So its understandable if it turned out
rough. Spiderman’s seen better days, but
he also has had a worst day before (Spiderman 3…) A decent movie, hopefully they learn from the
mistakes of this one. 7.6 out of 10
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