What can I say about The Amazing Spider-man 2 that hasn’t
already been said in the last week leading up to its release? Not much, there
are a lot of solid reasons to love it, and a quiet a few equally solid reasons
to hate it. All I can really do is present some of the things I liked, and some
that I didn’t like, and use my own wit and skill to show them in an interesting
manner. I’m going to try to keep spoilers to a minimum, though I think a quick
Google search will get the biggest bomb out of the way.
So,
what is there to like? Well, unlike the last Spidey film where they presented
multiple villains, there was actually a pretty decent balance with the main
two, Max Dillon aka Electro and Harry Osborn aka the Green Goblin (Although
Harry’s alias is never mentioned they really imply it). I’m sorry to say for
anyone hoping Paul Giamatti’s Rhino would be a major character, they pretty
much summed up his scenes in the movie in the trailers. Not exaggerating at all on that one, and that makes me a little sad.
It was rather amazing to see Jamie
Foxx, a celebrity that many would consider to be smooth, sexy, and/or cool to
play this version of Electro so well. When he is first presented Dillon is a
really stereotypical obsessive nerd. Spider-man saves his life early in the
film and he becomes utterly devoted. He has a shrine dedicated to his hero in
his apartment, he talks to himself pretending Spider-man is there and is his
best friend, and he even has a pretty entertaining fit when someone mocks the
wall-crawler. After getting his powers, and realizing that Spider-man doesn’t
even remember his name, Electro does what a lot of jilted fans/future stalkers
do. Vow vengeance and plot to make everyone who ever crossed him sorry. The
visual effects on his powers are really stunning, particularly scenes where
he’s flying at high speeds. 
Harry Osborn is also a decent
villain, but he does feel a little more rushed. His backstory is explained
rather quickly, he was shipped off to boarding school eight years prior,
traveled a bit, and finds out a few days before his father dies he has an
incurable genetic disease that will slowly eat away at his body, drive him
insane, and ultimately kill him. It took them five minutes to explain this. In
his first scene. Lot o stuff to process. He is like Venom in the original Spider-man’s third installment, where we only
see a little of his villainous alter ego, and that is a bit of the problem.
They make him look so creepy and badass but he’s only the Green Goblin for all
of about ten minutes. I’d say the potential was wasted but no to the same
degree as Venom was in Spider-man 3. 
Andrew Garfield’s performance as
Peter Parker/Spider-man was very good, as was Emma Stone’s as Gwen Stacey, and they
had very good chemistry together. But they played it up to much. There were
about two scenes too many where they did this same dance, “We want to be
together, we shouldn’t be together,” rinse and repeat. It really didn’t start
to bug me until a scene where Gwen is on her way to a scholarship interview and
Peter sort of tries to stop her that it got annoying. Sitting in the theater I
drummed my fingers on the armrest and thought, “This is so obviously fluff it’s
sickening,” and I stand by that. A five minute scene that’s only point was to
further drive home the point that Peter loves Gwen, Gwen loves Peter, life is
hard, and sometimes romance gets complicated. It made my head hurt.
Now I’ve covered a lot of stuff in
a small amount of space but I want to devote a small section to the biggest
problem with this film, it wastes time. A lot of time. The movie’s overall
run-time, from the starting credits to the post credits is two hours and twenty
minutes. There are at least twenty minutes that could be cut. And I’m not just
talking scenes that run too long, I’m talking entire sections of the movie that
are rather pointless. Case in point, the airport scenes. Towards the films
climax Electro sucks up all the power from the New York electrical grid. He
cuts the power to the city that never sleeps. Because of this, two planes are
going to collide because they don’t have navigation telling them they are on an
intersecting flight path. We see the pilots on both planes finding out they are
flying blind, we see the tower people trying to get back online, and we see the
two planes impossibly miss each other when Spidey saves the day. Every second
of these three to five minute scenes are completely pointless. It doesn’t
contribute to the fight, to Peter personally, or to even the gravity of the
situation. New York is in a city wide blackout, we need nothing else to tell us
that that is BAD. All it took, for me at least, to get the gravity of what was
going on was to see New York black. The iconic buildings of Time Square, the
Oscorp tower, the planes taking off, that is all I needed to know that “it” was
about to hit the fan.
The climax didn’t make me tear up.
I heard sniffling and a few gasps, but as shocked as I was to see it portrayed the way it was, I’d been
expecting it from the start and honestly started to pray for it toward the
middle. Does this make me callous? Probably. But honestly people, was anyone
really shocked?
In the end I give it a B. I’m
probably being too generous, but Spider-man has a soft spot in my heart. There
are a lot of good elements, and a few things holding it back but all around
it’s not a bad flic. At the very least, it didn’t just feel like a commercial
for the Sinister Six movie. Side note, The Sinister Six are a team of
Spider-man’s enemies usually created and run by Dr. Octopus, though this movie
version suggests Harry will be in charge this go around. Back on task, it
didn’t just feel like set up. Well, for most of it.
I used this in my review of this film, a professor once said to me separate the person from the author when grading papers.
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