AndrewBloom
CONTAINS SPOILERS5/10 2 years ago
[4.9/10] What frustrates me the most about *The Amazing Spider-Man 2* is that there’s a strong core story here. Peter and Gwen have tremendous chemistry. You *want* them to be together. But as is inevitably the case, Peter’s moonlighting creates problems for his ability to be in a relationship. So too does his promise to Captain Stacey, who glowers at him from beyond the grave. So you play the forbidden romance angle. You play Peter and Gwen pushing things to the limit, making their own choices, until suddenly there’s a cost to it. A villain senses Spider-Man’s attachment. Gwen has to pay the cost. And Peter has to live with the guilt.
There’s so much there! Most movies would kill to have a romance that works as well as the one that Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone paint on the screen. The fact that they clearly love one another but think the relationship is bad for both of them adds complication and passion to it. And there being a consequence for them giving in despite the risks, with Captain Stacey’s worst fear coming to pass, adds tragic weight to it. You could do so much with the ideas, the character work, the engrossing energy on screen, with those elements in play.
Instead, *TASM2* squanders it all by cramming in umpteen other storylines, a pair of terrible central performances, and a morass of ugly CGI nonsense that effectively killed this series of films. Why in god’s name the powers that be at Sony decided that what the movie needed was *more more more* is beyond me. It’s a trap so many cape flicks fall into, and that the studio itself had already stepped in with the abominable *Spider-Man 3* just seven years earlier.
Suffice it to say, it’s not enough to focus on Peter Parker’s relationship to your other major character and have it threatened by a single villain who threatens or otherwise reflects it in some way. No, we need an opener and closer with Rhino. And we need Max Dillon going from spider-fan to superpowered spider-hater as Electro. And we need Harry Osborn coming back to town, demanding Spider-Man’s blood, and turning into the Goblin. And we need Aunt May becoming a nurse. And for some godforsaken reason, we need to continue the storyline of a hush-hush corporate conspiracy to take out and frame Peter’s father.
Even if all of these plots were good, which they’re definitely not, it would just be too much for a two hour and change movie. The generous phrase to use here is, “It’s rather cluttered.” The less charitable one is, “This is a sloppy, ill-considered mess.” None of these pieces fit together, None of them feed into one another. The attempts to merge and meld them lead to a janky, ungainly movie where stories simply crash into one another rather than bound gracefully like the web-head himself.
Somehow, the worst part is the villains, which is always an awful sign. It’s okay for villains to be boring if the real meat of your story is in the hero’s personal growth. It’s also okay for the villains to steal the show, since they typically get to go wilder and have more fun than the good guy does. But it’s not okay for the villains to be laughably bad, in their appearances, character arcs, and performances.
What in God’s name were Jamie Foxx and Dane DeHaan thinking? Foxx does the cartooniest, most screw-loose nerd character for Max Dillon, and then turns into a self-possessed cold-blooded killer when he becomes Electro. The two guises are bad on their own terms but also have nothing to do with one another regardless. Some of that’s on the writing, which succumbs to the same “science-y thing happened and now I’m evil and CRAZY!” villain story the previous four Spider-Man films had used. But some of it’s on Foxx, who plays Dillon and Electro as two entirely different people.
Plus good lord, what sort of weird, affected voice is DeHaan putting on for Harry Osborn. I guess you can say that he’s making choices as an actor, but the effort to play the spoiled, patently evil son of wealth is embarrassingly bad. It presages Jesse Eisenberg’s strange, tic-filled take on Lex Luthor in *Batman v. Superman*, and saps any power of the character’s relationship with and betrayal of Peter Parker.
The shame to this is that while the writing of the characters sucks on a scene-to-scene basis, there’s decent ideas behind each of them. Max Dillon feels invisible until Spider-Man saves him; he feels betrayed when Spidey doesn't remember him, and his new powers and ill-deeds make him feel literally and figuratively seen. Harry is desperate to avoid his father’s fate, is legitimately screwed over by the same corrupt corporate execs who screw Max, and believes he has a cure for both their problems. You can see how parts of it could succeed, at least on paper, if the execution of the ideas were not so clunky and downright baffling at times.
Of course, it must be noted that both of them look terrible. Electro’s Dr. Manhattan-esque azure hue looks like a cartoon plastered into live action. Harry’s Gollum-esque look makes him seem like a cast-off from a toothpaste commercial after unconvincingly playing plaque. And the events in the movie’s climactic third act bore rather than wow because they look like an unreal, video game cutscene the whole time. Nothing has weight or visual plausibility, just an ugly mess of implausible nonsense that makes you tune out from the emotional gut punch of the film.
While not quite as bad, all the material involving Peter’s parents, and the conspiracy plot to slander him, and Spidey’s byzantine mystery-solving to uncover the truth is just so uninvolving. There’s no reason why Spider-Man couldn’t uncover a vast corporate conspiracy, but it’s tonally distinct from all the other supernatural and more personal business going down here, so it feels like something shoehorned in from another movie entirely. You can sense director Marc Webb and company not only wanting to build to some payoff in the third movie, but also trying to connect everything here to launch a broader “cinematic universe” at a time when the MCU was soaring and Sony wanted to yell “Us too!” without the time to properly set it up or, indeed, evidently the know-how.
There’s no edit or cut that could fix these things. There is so much detritus in the soul of *The Amazing Spider-Man 2*, so many ill-conceived choices slapped together, all of which seem inextricable from one another. Every bad decision is cinematic gum in your hair; every attempt to remove it just seems to get more tangled in the mess.
But for all those missteps, what works about the movie is the same thing that worked about the last one: Peter and Gwen. Spider-Man himself is much improved here, quipping and joking and seeming far more whimsical and relatable than the generic cool misfit spit out in the last one. Plenty of his interludes and exchanges here are downright fun, a marked contrast from the first *TASM* outing.
Yet, while the banter between Peter and Gwen is frequently also fun, as the two have a great comic rapport with lines that ably mimic the inside jokes and ribbing tone affectionate couples take, it also comes with an undercurrent of pain. Peter doesn’t want Gwen to become collateral damage. Gwen doesn’t want Peter to keep jerking her around like this. They’re pulled together by their love but pushed apart by the star-crossed nature of their relationship. It feels real and meaningful, even in the shadow of the stupid, oft-convoluted events happening around them.
It’s just not enough to save a bad movie. *The Amazing Spider-Man 2* ends this unfortunate duology on a low note. It wastes a great story in a mess of awful ones. It loses the clarity of Spider-Man’s love and loss in a wash of other less-interesting cinematic and superheroic bric-a-brac. It loses any goodwill by going overlong and overstuffed. There was so much promise here, in two stellar central performances and enough good ideas to keep fueling them.
But after an outing this rough, the *TASM* franchise deserved to be laid to rest like Gwen Stacey. and the only thing worth mourning is what might have been had the powers that be capitalized on their good fortune in casting and chemistry instead of squandering it.
