Director: Marc Webb
Starring: Andrew Garfield, Dane DeHaan, Emma Stone, Jamie Foxx, Colm Feore, Sally Field, Campbell Scott, BJ Novak, Felicity Jones, Denis Leary, Paul Giamatti, Chris Cooper
It’s fair to say that 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man so that Sony could keep the rights to the character. Although it wasn’t terrible, it was genuinely below the quality we expected, seemed wildly unnecessary and under-grossed Sam Raimi’s superior trilogy. It was still successful enough to confirm numerous sequels however and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 comes with the promise that they’d learned from their previous errors.
In New York, Peter Parker (Garfield) is living a double life: one as the crime fighting vigilante Spider-Man and the other as a graduating student. Both lives are haunted by the death of Captain Stacy (Leary) and are turned upside down by the arrival of angered young billionaire Harry Osborn (DeHaan), who’s set to take over his sick father’s (Cooper) genetics empire. Meanwhile, lonely Oscorp, the Osborn’s company, employee Max Dillon (Foxx) suffers a severe accident at work, giving him the power to manipulate electricty. All of these events cause a rift in his relationship with the Captain’s daughter Gwen (Stone) and his Aunt May (Field), who may just hold the answer to his parent’s disappearance.
It’s a shame to say that this sequel doesn’t seem to have learnt from its predecessor. Its attempted to be much lighter but that’s ended up with some poor dialogue, particularly Spidey’s sluggish quips. We don’t exactly get a balance of this and the more horrifying sequences. There’s a constant lack of terror without and becomes hard to take the ludicrous action seriously. The reinvented Green Goblin and Electro were well designed but lacked the terror of Evil Dead’s horror maestro Sam Raimi’s trilogy and its villains.
We can accept the bonkers action in The Avengers and its likes because we better understand the bridge between the heroes and their alter-egos. In this, Spider-Man is a completely different person to Parker and I don’t think there’s one transformation scene. The deactivation of Spidey’s web shooters ends up with an uninteresting physical comedy sequence and some remarkably poor exposition.
There are few technical issues too. There’s an attempt to introduce a new heroic main theme that doesn’t quite mix with Electro’s numbing dubstep, despite boasting The Dark Knight’s Hans Zimmer. The CG in Spider-Man’s breathtaking swinging endeavourers is of great quality but the numerous slo-mo scenes, rather than increasing both detail and awe, take the life out of the action.
There are numerous highlights amongst the messy plot however. Emma Stone is greatly entertaining as Gwen as she continues to bemuse Peter. With their excellent and believable dynamic, he and the charismatic Garfield form the most convincing couple there’s been in a superhero movie but the 25 year old Stone and 30 year old Garfield still aren’t convincing as newly graduated students, and that is a huge issue with the film’s credibility.
Jamie Foxx meanwhile fantastically judges his performance as (not literally) invisible tech nerd and Spider-Man fanatic Max. His horrific accident is well handled and Electro is initially frightening in the Times Square set piece but after that he lost his sense of presence in the film.
Without trying to give much away, the film’s other villain is Dane DeHaan’s Osborn who’s desperate for the cure for his fatal disease and that desperation leads to a horrifying step into villainy. While DeHaan is both engaging and believable, he seems to have been typecast in the same neglected angst-filled role he did in Chronicle. With all of these villains, the film struggles to find a defining closing action sequence and in the end settles for three, dragging out the thin, scattershot plot even further.
Annoyingly, the film’s two most esteemed actors, Paul Giamatti and Chris Cooper, are reduced to cameo-like small roles. Giamatti plays Russian mobster Aleksei, a character with a tonne of cheap lines in the cartoonish opening sequence and likely less than three minutes’ screen time. Cooper meanwhile seems as if he’d appeared in multiple deleted scenes; his sinister motives are never fully explained and the mystery of his and Richard Parker’s work has been given a dissatisfying end to focus on Sony’s developing superhero world.
That could be a step in right direction however. Spider-Man’s read a page of Captain America: The Winter Soldier’s book; it certainly knows how to get the Marvel super-fans incredibly excited and so to reel them in for future instalments. Sadly a little too much of these in-movie teasers are in the actual trailers but that’s no reason to not let the endless hidden references, chiefly the brewings of The Gentleman and The Sinister Six, get you in the mood for more Marvel.
6/10
“Everyone has a part of themselves they hide, even from the people they love most. And you don’t have forever, none of us ever do.”
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