You could say it all boils down to release dates. The Amazing Spider-man, the much
maligned yet surprisingly enjoyable reboot that featured a wall-crawler truer
to the comics, was released in June 2012, just five years after Tobey Maguire
hung up his webs and called it a day. With The
Amazing Spider-man 2 opening not even a full two years after the last
instalment, you’d be forgiven for questioning whether Sony and Columbia
Pictures are being a bit precipitous with the Spiderman franchise.
You wouldn’t be wrong, for what we have here is
a shiny-looking blockbuster with an astonishingly clunky plot that feels
disjointed and unfocused, the key signs of a film that was rushed into
production, the script a mere afterthought. The fact that Shailene Woodley’s
scenes as pending love interest Mary Jane Watson were shot and subsequently cut
from the film only adds further validity to this theory. With the pace never truly
picking up, TAS2 can often prove to
be quite a laborious viewing experience.
For starters, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman’s
already crowded screenplay dedicates far too much time to Peter Parker’s
parents’ death, a mystery which was never a big concern in the comic books and that
only bogs down the film’s lengthy running time. Secondly, director Mark Webb’s insistence
on having his central couple Peter and Gwen Stacy caught up in a never-ending game
of break-up/make-up is also perplexing, especially as it seemed like he’d
surmounted that issue in the closing scenes of the previous film. Throw in the
decision to populate the movie with multiple villains, and suddenly you realise
you’ve got quite a bit of material to cover in 140 minutes.
Speaking of which, there are also a few glaring
missteps in the portrayal of the villains, especially Jamie Foxx’s Electro, who
the posters and trailers reliably inform us is the main big bad. His human
alter-ego, Max Dillon – a sad, forgotten loner longing for attention – is an
interesting proposition, someone that should creep us out and elicit our
sympathy in equal measure, but for some reason Foxx plays the role for laughs.
Post-transformation, he’s a blue-skinned, gravelly-voiced nutter with the power
to shoot electrical discharges. Pure eye candy, granted, and he’s also at the
centre of the film’s more memorable action sequences, but it also means that Electro
feels more like an end level boss, rather than a fully rounded character. And
as for Paul Giamatti’s Russian mobster Rhino… what a waste of a good actor and
comic book character.
Dane DeHaan’s Harry Osborn on the other hand,
is a far more intriguing villain. Financially privileged but despised by his
dying father and colleagues, he could’ve easily ended up as a spoilt rich
kid caricature, but thanks to DeHaan’s jittery performance, he comes off instead
as a plausibly disturbed young man dealing with a plethora of insecurities. And
while his issues fittingly culminate in a horrific transformation into the
Green Goblin, his sudden urge to don a battle suit, not to mention his
dexterity at surfing a flying glider, is rather baffling.
Mind you, it’s not that TAS2 gets everything wrong – in fact, there are a few neat touches
that ensure it’s not a complete failure. The web-swinging sequences are getting
more inventive (although with the constant developments in CGI, that’s to be
expected) and are brought to life both by 3D vision and Hans Zimmer’s sumptuous
score (but we could’ve done without the dubstep in the Electro sequences). The
chemistry between real life couple Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone is still a
joy to watch, which also means that TAS2
will go down well as a first date movie. And while the third act momentarily steers
proceedings into much darker territory, Mark Webb is smart to enough to realise
that, unlike Batman, Spidey is a character that thrives out of the shadows and
ends the film on a reassuringly upbeat note.
At the centre of all this well-intentioned
confusion is Garfield (the actor, not the cat), who once again proves that,
while Sam Raimi may have directed better Spider-man films, Webb undeniably has
the better Spider-man. Witty, charming and unapologetically verbose, he manages
to embody the true essence of the character from the comics. More crucially, he
has not yet done a Saturday Night Fever strut down the street à la Spider-man 3. Here’s hoping that, with
bit more time at disposal and a better script at hand, The Amazing Spider-man 3 won’t go down that route too.
2/5
