directed by Marc Webb
screenplay by Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Jeff Pinkner
I will be candid: this review will be quite a bit longer than most of my reviews because of my affection for the Spider-Man character. To my mind, more than any other character in the Marvel pantheon, Spider-Man deserves a perfect movie, or as near as one can get to it, and it saddens me that, this time around, he did not get the masterpiece he deserved.
A lot has been said, much of it bad, about the sequel to The Amazing Spider-Man Sony Pictures' 2012 reboot of the cinematic saga of Marvel Comics superhero Spider-Man, who once upon a time sat atop the cinematic roost as king of comic book heroes and Marvel-based heroes in particular until he was displaced by the concerted efforts of six of his fellow Marvel heroes in a little movie called The Avengers. The movie has, so far, gotten worst reviews of any of the films in the series (yes, even including the much-reviled Spider-Man 3) and the cacophony of fanboys calling for the failure of this film is at a fever pitch. Notably, these are no longer even just the DC comics fanboys cheering for their Nolan/Snyder produced "horses" but actual Marvel fanboys wanting Sony Pictures, who have had the rights to make movies on this property for the better part of two decades now, to lose money on this movie so that they will willingly cede the property back to Marvel, who now have their own film studio.
Since the Avengers stopped an alien fleet from destroying the world (or at least New York City), it seems to me that Sony Pictures felt they had to up the ante somehow from the flawed but entertaining first reboot with some really over-the-top flourishes. I can just imagine the meetings: "Let's shoot the whole movie in New York and not having Los Angeles or Toronto double for it!" or "Let's have two or more villains, one of them with the capacity to mess up the whole city!" or "Let's give Peter's parents their own action scene!" or "Let's hire the guys who wrote the Transformers movies!"
As a result of what I strongly suspect is an effort to outdo Marvel studios in the fireworks department, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is at least twenty minutes too long and feels a little bit cluttered at many points.
The movie picks up from where the last film has left off; Peter Parker a.k.a. Spider-Man (Andrew Garfield) is about to graduate from high school, while struggling with the secret behind his parents' disappearance as well as his on-again, off-again relationship with girlfriend Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone), mainly due to his promise to Gwen's departed dad, Police Captain George Stacy (Denis Leary) to keep her out of Spider-Man's dangerous life. Things get even more complicated for him when Gwen is offered a scholarship into Oxford University...which happens to be in England. Then, shortly after mentally-unbalanced electrical engineer Max Dillon (Jamie Foxx) has a little workplace accident that transforms him into the deadly Electro, and an old friend, Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan) returns from an extended visit to Europe to visit his dying dad Norman (Chris Cooper), only to discover somewhat troubling secrets about himself, Spider-Man comes face-to-face with challenges that will change him forever.
The subplot involving Peter's parents was always suspect, even when the new Spider-crew introduced it with the reboot, and here it simply takes up too much screen time and pays off in a revelation that seems meant to be important but feels utterly superfluous. By itself it's already ten minutes of the film that could have been cut right out, leaving the rest of the film none the worse for its removal.
Another misstep the producers took this time was the realization of Jamie Foxx's Max Dillon, a.k.a. Electro. I'll grant that Dillon is painted as a lonely, maltreated, mentally unstable electrical engineer before he transforms, courtesy of a rather silly accident into Electro, but to my mind the transition from disturbed individual to full blown psychopath feels extremely abrupt. The script's approach to Electro, as well as Foxx's portrayal of the nerdy Dillon, feel unnecessarily campy, and as fantastical as the character's origin is, I had a particularly hard time suspending my disbelief here. I groaned in the theater when Max called a colleague of his to shut down the electrical grid where he was working so that he could repair a broken cable, only to be told that this man was calling it a day and could not be bothered to help him. So, Oscorp, a multi-billion dollar company has only one person working its whole power grid, who would rather rush home than help another employee fix a building's broken power cable that could potentially screw up the entire building? That's the kind of contrivance one could expect from a 1960s comic book, but not from a contemporary feature film. The consolation, though, is that once Foxx goes into full-on villain mode, he is quite convincingly menacing, and the effects that go into visualizing him are absolutely top-notch.
My final major gripe is the story arc of this particular version of Harry Osborn, played by Dane DeHaan. Truth be told, I quite enjoyed DeHaan's performance. In fact, of the two new kids on the block, him and Foxx, I have more praise for DeHaan, who takes a decidedly different approach to the Osborn character from that of his predecessor James Franco. There are still the daddy issues, to be sure, but DeHaan's Harry, who learns he is virtually terminally ill, does a good job of conveying desperation on top of the pathos of a neglected child, and DeHaan channels a younger Leonardo diCarpio, not just because of the physical resemblance but on account of more than a few of his mannerisms. Most importantly, however, his screen chemistry with Garfield's Peter is palpable, so that even if their friendship isn't quite as close as it was in the Raimi's films, there's still a genuine sense of tragedy when things inevitably go sour. What I did not at all appreciate, however, was the corporate mutiny plotline that the filmmakers rehashed from the very first Spider-Man movie. It was, in a word, irritating. Surely, I thought, there are other ways to motivate a character other than by taking away his money and power.
I have a minor quibble too, and it is with the presentation of the character eventually known as the Rhino, but without spoiling too much I can categorically say that he has hardly any screen time and therefore hardly any bearing on the story. What I sincerely disliked about the character, though, was Paul Giamatti's over-the-top, utterly hammy performance, which depressed and annoyed me in equal parts considering that Giamatti is one of my very favorite character actors and could have done so much better, no matter how small this role was. Heck, legendary actors like Robert Redford and Anthony Hopkins have taken their supporting roles in comic-book-based movies much more seriously, with Hopkins even having to wear garish costumes and speak flowery English, so Giamatti could have at least tried to act like he was in something other than a Saturday morning cartoon.
Yes, there is a lot that is wrong with this movie, but I will not join the bandwagon of hate against it because to my mind, Sony got the most important things right, starting with the title character. To my mind, Andrew Garfield IS Peter Parker, just as much as Robert Downey, Jr. IS Tony Stark and Tom Hiddleston IS Loki. He made a pretty good argument for his casting in the last movie but basically solidified it here. He has struck the delicate balance between Parker's inner loneliness and sense of guilt and responsibility on the one hand, and the unbridled cockiness and snark he assumes when he puts on the mask on the other, a duality that has been a hallmark of the character for fifty-two years, and which Tobey Maguire never even came close to accomplishing in any of the Sam Raimi movies. I cannot emphasize this point enough; for three movies I put up with Maguire's squeaky voice and misguided, at times borderline-condescending portrayal of Spider-Man. I didn't yearn for better because frankly, that was the hand I, along with all other movie viewers in the world, was dealt. What Garfield has done with the character, therefore is virtually miraculous; he has made this Spider-Man almost everything that Maguire's was not in the ways that truly count, and when this film is at its most ridiculous he remains its saving grace.
More than just Garfield's portrayal of the character, however, his relationships with his supporting cast also go a long way towards carrying the film. Peter' interactions with characters such as Sally Field's Aunt May, Gwen, and Harry, are defining moments in the film that come across as truly heartfelt stuff, and manage to give the film an emotional center of gravity even when the big-budget craziness threatens (as it does, many, many times) to carry the whole enterprise away like a runaway tornado. Full credit goes to Webb and all of the actors involved for getting this crucial aspect of the film right, but Garfield is at the heart of it all. His chemistry with real-life girlfriend Stone, as embodied in their dialogue and the body language they share, is utterly magical, and again, is far superior to any of the romantic sparks that flew between the Maguire's take on Peter and Kirsten Dunst's Mary Jane Watson, his squeeze in the old movie series. Also, I think Field's Aunt May is a lot more convincing than Rosemary Harris' ever was. In terms of the smaller, more intimate moments, this movie offers scenes that are just as good as, if not better than the very best that the Raimi movies had to offer. Every time they have these scenes it feels like a well-scripted independent movie about family and relationships has wandered onto the screen.
Not only that, but clearly a lot of effort has gone into making Spidey more convincing than he's ever looked; digital Spidey is looking slicker than he ever has before, and nearly every gravity-defying action sequence with him in it is utterly breathtaking, especially in 3-D. It helps that the filmmakers have outfitted Garfield and his stuntmen with the best Spider-Man costume that has ever been filmed, which brings back the best aspects of the Raimi-era suit and adds some welcome touches, like the snazzy oversized eyepieces which hearken back to the Spider-Man I grew up with: the McFarlane-era Spidey. Also, as overblown as many of the action sequences are, I genuinely appreciated the fact that one of the most impressively-staged ones involved Spider-Man using his head and his lightning-fast reflexes to save a whole bunch of bystanders from getting both squashed by a flying car and fried by one of Electro's blasts. More than being just an orgy of computer-generated imagery, this scene punctuated something very important about Spider-Man: his sense of responsibility extends to all civilians caught in the crossfire of his titanic battles and he will do everything in his power and skill to save them.
All told, to my mind the film's biggest problem was that its makers were constantly trying to one-up the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut that is Marvel Studios in the slam-bang action department, and so rather than let this film be its own thing, like the Spider-Man films of old used to do, they tried to make almost everything "bigger," from the multiple bad guys to the work of composer/fanboy god Hans Zimmer and his "Magnificent Six." I appreciated Zimmer's work here, though at some points of the film it struck me that he was repeating his new theme for the character as often as he was in order to drum out of the viewer's head the music that his predecessor James Horner had written for the character. Well, sorry Zimmer, but I for one am still partial to Horner's music, mainly because, like the parts of this film that work, it feels more intimate, and more personal.
In closing, I think that Sony would have done well to learn from Marvel's most recent, acclaimed blockbuster Captain America: The Winter Soldier, in which the massive CGI-laden climax was practically a footnote to a film that had already spent the majority of its running time building up its plot and characters. In crafting the sequel that is probably all but a foregone conclusion at this point, I hope Sony remembers a valuable lesson from this film: while good characterization and awesome CGI will always have a place in a Spider-Man movie, bigger isn't always better.
6/10
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