Film Reaction: THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2

 It's weird that this film has so many posters,

yet none of them feel like 'THE' poster, y'know?

The Amazing Spider-Man was a dull, routine, soulless cash-grab, a mercenary movie built purely to retain publishing rights to its title character, devoid of any artistic spark for fear of individual creativity somehow getting in the way of franchise longevity.  I hated it like fire, and in the same year that gave us The Dark Knight Rises it somehow made Nolan's nadir look good by comparison.  Unfortunately, ol' Web-Head is too popular to die, so the thing still made money, and now the same creative team are back for round 2, with the 'help' of two of the men who inflicted Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and Star Trek Into Darkness upon us.

Look on the bright side, though: with that all in mind, who's gonna go into this one with hopes high enough to be savagely dashed upon the rocks of reality?  Forewarned is forearmed.

 "Oh god, I should not have braced this with my neck.

I need a Spectacular Spider-Doctor, stat!"

The Plot:  All seems to be well in the double life of Peter Parker a.k.a. Spider-Man (Andrew Garfield).  He's doing a pretty great job of keeping New York safe, he's about to graduate from college, he's still dating the absurdly pretty Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone), oh and he's being haunted by visions of her dead father that are totally guilt-tripping him into breaking up.  Maybe that's not really 'doing well', I guess.  But no sooner does he start fretting over girl troubles that more distractions arrive on his plate.  First, his old pal Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan) returns to town, and has a rather urgent favour to ask of the city's favourite wall-crawler; second, OsCorp employee and Spider-Man obsessive Max Dillon (Jamie Foxx) has an unfortunate accident and is reborn as the unpredictable, destructive Electro.  Can Spider-Man rise to the challenge?  Okay, okay, he will, obviously, but like, how?

...Norbit? 

The Good:  The colours!  Yes, that's a weird thing to open with, but I think it's important to stress.  ASM1 for reasons unknown (but easily blamed on typical studio thinking) was set 90% at night-time and bathed everything in the kind of oppressive darkness even Batman finds scary, which is both a weird decision for a movie about Spider-Man and a poor artistic choice, as the whole film varied between bland and ugly-looking.  ASM2 course-corrects from that, with a lot more daylight scenes and a deliberately exaggerated colour palette that's just about crazy enough to suggest a sense of heightened reality without scaring the precious audience by being interesting or something (woops, there I go again).  Despite my tone, this was a great move, and the almost neon-bright highlights in the night scenes bring us closer to legit comic-book material than we've come in this series before.

Speaking of getting away from unnecessary darkness, the creative team's found its joking backbone this time around.  For whatever reason I've seen a whole lot of people defend ASM1 by claiming it gave us the 'quipping' Spidey that was missing from the Raimi films, then bring up that one scene where Spidey acts like a raging asshole, needlessly tormenting a car thief then verbally abusing a police officer.  Again, ASM2 learns from that mistake, and though Garfield's snarky tone can still grate, the quips this time are actually funny, there's enough of them to feel like a true character trait and not just a box-ticking exercise, and they keep the film feeling frothy and light despite the usual attempts to make this entry the 'serious' one.

The stresses of dating a superhero have driven Gwen to

believing she's in Silent Hill.

Freed from trying to fit his round peg in the square hole left by Tobey Maguire (this Peter Parker would never get picked on in high school), Andrew Garfield seems more calm and comfortable in the title role.  It's still tricky to get a solid handle on him - the wisecracks-as-defense-mechanism schtick runs the risk of making Peter oddly distant - but he manages to make Peter's friendship with Harry tangible (which isn't easy since it wasn't even hinted at in film 1) and his breakdown during the climax is heart-rending stuff.  Opposite him, Emma Stone continues to be a delight as Gwen Stacy through sheer force of personality; there's not a lot to the character in the script, especially with the overly-manufactured scenarios designed to put her under stress, but Stone has more than enough charm to compensate for that, and as far as superhero couples go, this take on Peter/Gwen is second only to Thor/Jane Foster in the cuteness stakes.

Beyond those two, the film scores big with Dane DeHaan.  He's such a magnificently oily bastard as Harry Osborn that it's almost a shame he has to become the Unnamed-In-This-Film Goblin, since he's far better suited to sneering put-downs and lounging around making lizard eyes at everyone else than he is at pretending to ride a flying wakeboard.  Nevertheless he's a magnetic presence on-screen and you're left pining for his magnificent assholery whenever he vanishes.  Elsewhere, in an appearance that's not much more than a cameo, Paul Giamatti is a riot as Aleksei Sistyekevitch, with an amazingly exaggerated accent and a wide selection of rage-faces.  Sally Fields gets a better turn as Aunt May this time, too, possibly thanks to not having to share all her scenes with the more 'important' Uncle Ben; she's still some distance away from my idea of May but she's more substantive now.

Also, full credit to the filmmakers for the climactic scenes, which hit the right beats and aren't afraid to veer into naff/camp territory in order to get the emotional hook stuck in tight.  I don't want to talk about this in detail, because spoilers and so on, but there is one effects shot in particular which could potentially make the audience groan aloud but really sold the scene for me.

I swear, every time I try and think of something nice to say,

someone shows me a pic of Goblin and it alllll dries up.

The Bad:  ...unfortunately said climax ends with at least a further 10 minutes of movie left to run.  I...I don't even know how that happened; there's a perfect downer ending in place, but then it's like the director/writers decided to stitch on the opening scenes from Amazing Spider-Man 3 (which is not a thing that officially exists yet) before the credits roll.  It's just a really weird thing to do, structurally, and means the viewer leaves the film with the sensation that it's still going on somewhere, just without cameras.  This isn't a 'sequel tease', this is starting to make the sequel then sticking it onto the end of the one before.  It's not needed here.

Beyond that, the structure of the film won't surprise you, largely because it seems to have been made with the Do-It-Yourself Superhero Sequel Construction Kit.  Easily-overcome troubles afflicting the hero's relationship with his lover?  Check.  New bad guy repeatedly stressed as being 'too much to handle' to artificially inflate threat level?  Check.  Moment of personal loss causing hero to give up their career?  Checkity-check.  Increased civic destruction?  Damn right it's a check.  Now, this isn't quite so much a problem as ASM1 retreading nearly every significant beat from the first Spider-Man, and this certainly doesn't feel like a remake of Spider-Man 2, but at the same time it's all so predictable that it's tough to really lose yourself and get excited.

JAZZ-HANDS, the danciest foe Spider-Man has ever faced!

Electro has a whole bunch of problems tied to him like cement shoes.  While I do see the amusement in getting Jamie Foxx, one of the 'coolest' actors anyone could name, to play a mumbling introverted geek stereotype, the end result doesn't quite feel worthwhile and Foxx never seems to settle into Max properly; he's not playing it nearly as broadly as Giamatti but he's not quite as naturalistic as the rest of the cast, existing in some halfway point between them.  Then he formally becomes Electro, with CG'd face and distorted voice, and most of his previous character work is washed away in 15 minutes, leaving Foxx to just yell a bunch about SQUASHING YOU LIKE BUGS and I WILL BE A GOD and other things that turn up on supervillain bingo sheets.  He's just a big void of vague evil, and for a character who attracted the big 'star casting' and is front and centre on most of the promotional material, he winds up as kind of an irrelevance to the plot.

There's some letdowns here and there on the technical side, too.  While some - most, actually - of the CG work is convincing, and we're way past the old 'bendy Spidey toy' days when it comes to web-swinging, there are occasions when Movie Electro appears to have been replaced by a lower-poly-count Electro from the tie-in videogame, and for a certain other villain the composite shots of the actor's face against a CG body are startlingly amateurish.  And then there's the music.  A collaborative effort between Johnny Marr, trendy pop irritant Pharrell Williams and Nolanverse BWAMMMMing favourite Hans Zimmer, there are stretches where the score is 'good enough', by which I mean it blends into the background and maybe slightly compliments the action without drawing attention.  However, the central 'hero theme' for Spidey himself is somehow even more overblown than James Horner's work on the last film - in fact, it might trump even John Williams' famous Superman theme for sheer bombast, and for a character of more modest means like Spider-Man it's just overkill.  And then there's Electro again, whose appearances are heralded by some effectively creepy strings and a weird whispering monologue that at first I thought was someone in the audience talking during the movie, distracting me.  Then it got louder and louder and louder, but never quite clear and usually overlapping with actual dialogue, and it's just super-annoying when you're trying to focus on one and lose track of the other.

And I'm not going to waste your time complaining about the character designs because you've no doubt already heard about it.  Basically, Spider-Man suit good, everything else bad.

 Even swinging into the city from Blade Runner

couldn't get Electro off his tail!

The Verdict:  It'd probably be easy to rail on Amazing Spider-Man 2 for a lot longer, in more detail, but I don't think that's completely fair.  It is a very corporate movie, it is copying the footsteps of other, better films, but sometimes a good handling of tone and a bit of charm is enough to overcome the sensation of going through the motions, and that's what I'm feeling here.  ASM2 will never be anyone's favourite film - I expect it won't even be anyone's favourite film of this year - but it's a hard film to dislike, and it's at least learned enough from its predecessor to feel like an honest improvement and leave me with some hope for this series going forwards.  And if it's enough to make me say that after what I thought of the last one, well.

Calling it a 6 out of 10.  Might've given it a 7 if they'd found some way to tease Mysterio.  WHY IS THERE NO LIVE-ACTION MYSTERIO YET ARGH

Your criticisms make Spider-Man sick.

With great power comes a weak immune system.