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The good
Acting saved the disjointed story from being laughable. Great action sequences and special effects
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The bad
Very little action so the impact is minimal and If you've seen every trailer you've seen all the action. Villains have zero plans throughout the movie. Too campy at times. The almighty fire alarm
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The ugly
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is a superhero action moving starring everyone’s friendly neighborhood Spider-man and is the sequel to the 2012 reboot. Spider-man might be friendly but his origins are anything but as the opening scene has Peter Parker’s father, Richard, recording a video message for someone who he hoped would eventually find it and understand the decisions he was getting ready to make. Part of this plan was leaving Peter with his Uncle Ben and Aunt May, before he and his wife, Mary, boarded a private plane to an unknown destination. Mary is struggling with the decision but Richard explains to her that this is the only chance Peter has for a normal life since they’ll be looking over their shoulders for the rest of their lives. And he was absolutely correct because they would be attacked mid-flight while he was attempting to upload a file called Roosevelt, and it’s a brutal battle as the man not only shoots Mary but tries to retrieve the laptop from Richard and escape but fails. And in his final act, Richard is able to upload the file before the plane goes down. They truly believed they were doing what was best and also protecting Peter but they didn’t have a clue that one day he would be swinging around Manhattan trying to stop a truck filled with stolen containers of plutonium on the same day he would be graduating from high school. To him it’s just another day as Spider-Man yet even he doesn’t know how his life will soon become far more dangerous and not just for him but his loved ones as well.
Zero days without an incident…
After watching this movie I tried to look at it from many different angles to see if there was anything I missed or if it was a matter of going into this movie with expectations *cough* Captain America 2 *cough* that distracted me from being able to enjoy it for what it was. I was able to gather myself but in a way that only confirmed why I had such a problem with this movie. It’s perplexing to me sometimes when people talk about Spider-Man as having these jovial stories that sometimes border on the naive when all my memories of Spider-Man comics growing up were ones that had some of the most profound and heartbreaking stories. Yes he could be very upbeat while Spider-Man and using his wit as a means of distracting from his life, to distract enemies, or some other reason that had nothing to do with him being carefree in life. His responsibility as Spider-Man started due to the death of his Uncle Ben and his guilt from that. I’ve read issues where a kid was killed by S.H.I.E.L.D. agents in front of him, his best friend died due to serum poisoning after trying to kill him, he was buried alive and I can give many other examples of somber story lines or tortured villains. So his connection to readers was his realistic every day struggles, just a regular guy with superpowers. Yet my problem isn’t because I felt they didn’t adhere to my view of Spider-Man because I perfectly understand things have to be adjusted to make a really good movie, it just didn’t hold up in so many other ways and mainly due to the fact it wasn’t a coherent story.
Now it started off really good with Peter’s parents dropping him off and clearly they were embroiled in some conspiracy and feared for their lives. The opening action sequence on the plane was intense despite some lingering thoughts such as “why was he trying to hold on to that?” And it transitioned beautifully to Spider-Man in a mid-dive off a building and the subsequent web swinging was great. I believed the tone was set with that opening sequence and the story would at least focus on the attempts to create human animal hybrids similar to the first movie but on a more sinister scale. And then the first chase through the city happened. It was slightly disheartening to see about 20 NYPD cars all driving right next to each other behind a truck carrying plutonium vials because it made zero sense, and yes all superhero movies require a suspension of disbelief but it was unnecessarily campy. Even then I thought, okay, let me lower my expectations of the realism of certain aspects of the movie so I could enjoy the ride. And it was humorous to see him trying to stop all the plutonium vials and taking that entire situation lightly, and the special effects showing his reaction times and awareness were top-notch. And then at the end of the sequence he’s haunted by a stern image of Gwen Stacy’s father reminding him of his promise from the first movie. The serious attack on the airplane and then the humorous treatment of NUCLEAR materials in Manhattan followed by a glaring dead father was just the start of this movie wanting to have it both ways in terms of its overall tone but not truly trying to succeed at either. And the fact this movie skips Peter revealing to Gwen Stacy his identity or her reaction to that and her father’s death was also the start of this movie ignoring so many things because it was temporarily convenient to move the story along at a point since she automatically knows he’s Spider-Man.
Still I ignored this since it was the start of the movie, and during this truck chasing sequence Spider-Man would encounter Max Dillon and save his life, which would make him Spider-Man’s biggest fan. Clearly he had serious issues but was still brilliant. He worked for Oscorp and was responsible for designing the power grid even though he was never given credit for it and this was an example of how he was always deliberately overlooked in life. His characterization was very quirky but it had its moments. But it was hard to accept a man being smart enough to design an entire power grid not being smart enough to know why it’s not a good idea to try to connect 2 electrical pipes while the power is still on over an open container of water with electric eels in it. If this was a setup by Oscorp to still secretly conduct their experiments on humans then I would have enjoyed this more but it was just a ridiculous accident. And the movie failed in giving a convincing reason for him to go from Spider-Man’s biggest fan to wanting to rule over the city to destroy Spider-Man. The movie Carrie did it better. And the amazing (no pun intended) action sequence during their first encounter was extremely impressive and probably did the best job of truly showing Spider-Man’s reflexes out of all the Spider-Man movies. But the crowd standing behind a small barricade cheering or booing them (which would be repeated in other parts) was the equivalent of having canned laughter in a comedy movie. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 didn’t suffer from an abundance of villains since it was pretty much Electro, it suffered from a lack of action scenes and its villain not having anything to do. He didn’t have a plot, he was just there, and it’s sad because he was pretty dope. And as a result his statements were hollow so him saying he wanted to create a world without Spider-Man didn’t make sense, or to quote Mary Jane from Spider-Man 2, “whatever that means.” When an additional action sequence or story line with Electro is sacrificed for an ultimately meaningless Aunt May hiding a job in a hospital story line, it leaves me scratching my head.
Now, I felt the acting was really good across the board but found the material to be very lacking. The majority of sequences focused on Peter and Gwen’s relationship, and the chemistry was definitely there but there was an overabundance of make up to break up scenes that became tedious because the story wasn’t going anywhere overall. I really enjoyed Gwen’s portrayal in a number of sequences too. And when Harry Osborn was introduced he was given an interesting situation and was impressive in his first appearances but then he became very one-dimensional and lost basic common sense considering his initial intelligence. He would want Spider-Man’s blood for a convincing reason but the fact that even this wasn’t tied to an overall sinister plot made it feel just as disjointed as Electro’s place in this movie. And it’s a shame how much was squandered in not using Oscorp as a means to connect these different story threads because the choice made time and time again was to ignore basic things just to move the story along or go to the next disjointed sequence. So zero security cameras in a high-tech corporation worried about secret experiments being leaked so Peter could use his webbing in a humorous sequence? No problem. Want to clear out a hidden high-tech bunker of all its security guards and personnel? Just pull a fire alarm that can literally be found in elementary schools. (Were they waiting for a fire truck to come and give them the okay to go back in?) These were the types of things that were making me angry and responsible for destroying my streak of days without an incident. It’s not good for a movie to make me think of Batman and Robin with the comical ways its villains were created, and I felt the execution of even simple things reeked of “well it’s a comic book story” mockery. And if its desire to want you to suspend your disbelief about simple things, such as the effectiveness of pulling a red fire alarm, but want you to also feel the full impact of very serious events wasn’t enough to make this movie disappointing, the fact that the ending makes the movie just feel like a huge prelude to a story that should have been explored in this movie should be enough. It was for me.
SUMMARY
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was a huge disappointment as it squandered the great acting with an extremely disjointed story line, villains who were just there with no purpose, and a campy feel that bordered on mocking at times. The action was electrifying but there was surprisingly very little of it as the focus was on just showing Peter and Gwen together instead of any plot by a villain. They kept answering “it’s complicated” to anyone who asked about their relationship and if anyone asks me what was the overall plot of Spider-Man 2 my answer would be it’s complicated. I can’t recommend the Amazing Spider-Man 2 despite some enjoyable moments and that makes me even angrier. So you can go see it if you’re willing to overlook a lot of things but I’m gonna go clean up the mess made from my latest rampage after seeing it.
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Rating ( 5.75 )
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Total score 5.8
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