by Erin Hatch, Editor-At-Large
What are the necessary components of a good Spider-Man movie? Big budget action sequences with cool, larger than life feats of amazing abilities are one of the basic required ingredients. There needs to be a love interest there too, and some emotional angst about power and responsibility versus personal desires. References to obscure comic characters or potential elements of future movies might be a good addition as well, since all the cool comic book movies seem to be doing it nowadays. Some humor is always nice. A little bit of mystery maybe? The Amazing Spider-Man 2 hits all of the required items on the checklist, but does so with such distorted logic that it feels like a paint-by-numbers mishmash of plot ingredients rather than a cohesive story.
The mishmash isn’t universally a bad thing: some of those plot ingredients are actually entertaining. Spider-Man moves with a dynamic grace as he flits across the screen saving the day, and some long shots of the hero’s movement through the city capture Spidey’s web-slinging better than ever before. The dialog is snappy and their are a number of funny visual gags keeping true to the character’s sense of humor. There are several references to various Spider-Man characters that do not feature directly into the story, leaving several possibilities for future plot points. There are dramatic moments that made me empathize with Peter Parker more than ever before. The problem is that most of these things are thrown in with a bunch of storytelling that isn’t actually required for the story they are trying to tell.
Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield: The Social Network, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus) is the agile, teenaged vigilante Spider-Man, who uses his radioactive spider powers to stop crime in New York City. His parents were murdered when he was a boy, and this is important for some reason, though the story doesn’t exactly explain why. It does provide Peter some angst, and provokes a brief investigation into his father’s mysterious activities prior to his violent death, but that investigation just kind of stops instead of going anywhere. Maybe the point was that Oscorp is evil. Is that even a spoiler?
I’m getting away from the plot summary.
Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone: Zombieland, Easy A) is Peter Parker’s girlfriend, and the daughter of the late Captain Stacy, whose dying wish was that Peter promise not to put his daughter in danger. Peter breaks up with Gwen to protect her, except he still loves her and the two struggle with the requisite ‘will they won’t they’ between love and responsibility, not helped by the fact that there is a crazy super villain running around with a grudge against the wall crawler. In fact, there are two such villains with interlocking plots that don’t really leave time for both to have their moment of glory. Max Dillon (Jamie Foxx: White House Down, Django Unchained) was a two dimensional caricature of the meekest, dumbest and most socially inept super genius alive (at least since Jim Carrey’s Riddler from Batman Forever) until a lab accident involving eels transformed him into Electro, a being of living energy. His hero worship of Spider-man quickly turns to murderous obsession because he thinks Spider-Man is an attention hog, or something like that. The murderous motivations of super villains don’t actually matter, right? Also Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan: Metallica Through the Never, The Place Beyond the Pines) is running around wishing he was still James Franco. Ok, he’s actually evil because he has a fatal genetic illness slowly turning him into a green, goblin-like creature. That is new, I guess.
Taken on their own the individual plot threads (Peter investigating his father’s research and death, Peter and Gwen wrestling with their relationship, Peter trying to help Harry with his problems without giving away the Spider-Man thing, Electro being an obsessive nerd who gains super powers and goes psychotic) might actually work as a story. Even combining some of those elements might have worked. But throwing everything in at once made the logical connections between some of the plot points fall apart. Electro gains powers and attacks the city? Obviously an inspiration for Peter to start investigating his father’s death. Right? Gwen has an internship at Oscorp, which means that she has the exact knowledge of operating a state of the art Oscorp power stations. Right? The plot points are presented in order, so of course they make sense. Only they don’t. They just happen because they need to push the story forward to the next requisite plot point, without regard for logic. For a film structured to be as deliberately symmetrical as Amazing Spider-Man 2 is, there are a lot of issues with linking individual scenes together.
It is a shame, too, because so much of the movie does have merit. The action scenes are engaging. The chemistry between Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone is great, even if Garfield is fairly bland as Peter Parker otherwise. The film is stunning visually, especially in IMAX 3D, and the stereoscopic conversion really works for the film. Yeah, some of the CG work feels a little cartoony, but there are some cool ideas despite the flawed execution.
Really, that goes for the movie as a whole: good intentions that aren’t executed as well as they could be. It might be worth going to the theatre to see the big fancy action sequences on the big screen, but don’t think too hard about the story or the entire experience is going to fall apart. It is impossible not to compare this movie to the recently released Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which blew audiences away. Cap had a solid story and a nice balance between real-world and comic-world fun. Spidey tries to have that balance, but ultimately suffers from villain-fatigue and poor writing.
Rating: 
ComicsOnline.com gives The Amazing Spider-Man 2 three out of five future super villain cameos.
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