Director: Marc Webb
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Film Pulse Score: 5.5/10
2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man was a passable, yet generic reboot that was more about Sony retaining the rights to the characters than it was crafting an original and interesting story. Now, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 brings all the generic aspects of the original back and compounds them by adding a plethora of pointless characters and a plot that swings in entirely too many directions. Like the first, it’s elevated with a solid principal cast, but the end result feels like something we’ve seen before many times over.
The complete chaos that is the plot of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is one of its most unfortunate aspects. The film begins with a quick flashback involving Peter’s parents followed quickly by an action sequence involving Paul Giamatti’s character, who will later become The Rhino. Then we catch up with Peter and Gwen’s relationship, then we’re introduced to Jamie Foxx as Max Dillon AKA Electro, then we meet Chris Cooper for two seconds as Norman Osborn, then we learn about Dane DeHaan as Harry Osborn, and then there’s five other plot points, you get the picture- there’s a lot going on in this movie.
Dane DeHaan as Harry was one of the new roles I was most interested in, as I think he’s got a very promising career ahead of him. Too bad his character felt completely rushed. He finds out he has the same illness as his father, who lived with it for decades, but it seems that Harry is all but dead from it merely days after realizing he has it. All the development with him felt like it was on fast forward just so they could cram in that action scene with him as the Green Goblin.
But really, why was Paul Giamatti in this movie for two seconds? Oh to set up The Amazing Spider-Man 3 or The Sinister Six? Sorry, that’s not an excuse for completely wasting our time with needless amounts of plot. Having some new character pop in during the post-credit stinger is great, but don’t do that during a film that’s already packed to the brim in plot. Other than the shameless plug for X-Men: Days of Future Past at the end for some reason, there was no post-credit stinger, so it would have been a perfect place to introduce Rhino.
On the more positive side, Marc Webb handles the wit of Peter Parker with ease, and Andrew Garfield once again proves himself as an excellent choice for Spidey. Other than maybe the ‘90s cartoon series, this is by far the best iteration of Spider-Man. From the goofy one-liners to the crazy web slinging, Spider-Man is a badass and it will never not be entertaining to watch him in action. Of course, like many of these super hero movies, he takes his mask off way too much and it gets annoying, but that’s just a small nit to pick in a movie full of more bothersome issues.
Jamie Foxx’s performance as Electro was fine, although I couldn’t help but be reminded of Arnold’s role as Mr. Freeze in Batman and Robin for some reason. The character felt entirely too overpowered though, being able to simply turn himself into electricity whenever he wanted and essentially destroy all of New York City.
Spider-Man is one of my all-time favorite comic book characters so it’s sad to see them being so lazy with this franchise. Sony needs to realize that simply throwing more characters and explosions into the mix doesn’t mean it will automatically be better. It’s not that The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is a terrible movie, but it just doesn’t even compare to the type of quality story telling that Marvel Studios has been releasing. I don’t want to see a movie that’s just about what’s going to happen in the next movie. Give me a solid contained story that I can enjoy and then tease me at the very end of what’s to come.
