The Amazing Spiderman 2: Movie Review
The Amazing Spider-Man 2, the sequel to the reboot of the series based on the comic book, is one of those movies that insiders used to describe as critic-proof.
But director Marc Webb and his flotilla of screenwriters seem to want to go one step further and create a movie that’s audience-proof. With studios now gleaning most of their revenue not from Americans steeped in Marvel mythologies and arcane origin stories, but from filmgoers from Brasilia to Beijing with new Imax 3-D theaters to test- drive, the point of filmmaking is to create an experience so insistently bombastic that novelty-starved audiences simply can’t not go. The Amazing Spider-Man 2, a strenuously chipper but nonetheless saggy, baggy and mostly ho-hum addition to the Spider-Man canon, belongs to the latter category, with the added asterisk that what was once its greatest strength its casting is on the verge of becoming its biggest liability. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 takes up pretty much where 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man left off, with Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) and his girlfriend, Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone), graduating from high school. After a grisly prologue revisiting the death of Peter’s parent’s years earlier, we’re shown that he’s still pursuing his extra-curricular hobby of saving New York as Spider-Man, the super-cool wall crawler sheathed in a blue-and-red bodysuit and blessed with super-human spider sense and web-spinning savvy.
Presumably, Peter and Gwen are heading into new and unchartered futures, but soon enough Peter is visited by his past, when Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan) returns to Manhattan to visit his father’s deathbed and take over the sinister family business. As a corporate hegemony that would make Donald Trump blush, Oscorp reigns supreme over the New York skyline, employing not just Gwen, but also an engineer named Max (Jamie Foxx), who crosses paths with Spider-Man in an encounter that will have fateful, if not fatal, reverberations. Granted, there are at least two genuinely breathtaking set pieces to be admired here, including a climactic, emotional gut-punch of a scene set in a clock tower toward the end of the film, and the transformation of Max into his own shimmering, translucent alter ego. (Both Foxx and DeHaan deliver promising turns in their respective good guy/bad guy personas.)
Whereas the chief pleasure of the first Amazing Spider-Man was the cuddly chemistry between Garfield and Stone, here they generate fewer sparks than questions, namely how a 30-year-old and 25-year-old despite their proven and prodigious talents, can be expected to play recent high school graduates with any degree of credibility.
The Amazing Spider-Man 2, the sequel to the reboot of the series based on the comic book, is one of those movies that insiders used to describe as critic-proof.
But director Marc Webb and his flotilla of screenwriters seem to want to go one step further and create a movie that’s audience-proof. With studios now gleaning most of their revenue not from Americans steeped in Marvel mythologies and arcane origin stories, but from filmgoers from Brasilia to Beijing with new Imax 3-D theaters to test- drive, the point of filmmaking is to create an experience so insistently bombastic that novelty-starved audiences simply can’t not go. The Amazing Spider-Man 2, a strenuously chipper but nonetheless saggy, baggy and mostly ho-hum addition to the Spider-Man canon, belongs to the latter category, with the added asterisk that what was once its greatest strength its casting is on the verge of becoming its biggest liability. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 takes up pretty much where 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man left off, with Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) and his girlfriend, Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone), graduating from high school. After a grisly prologue revisiting the death of Peter’s parent’s years earlier, we’re shown that he’s still pursuing his extra-curricular hobby of saving New York as Spider-Man, the super-cool wall crawler sheathed in a blue-and-red bodysuit and blessed with super-human spider sense and web-spinning savvy.
Presumably, Peter and Gwen are heading into new and unchartered futures, but soon enough Peter is visited by his past, when Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan) returns to Manhattan to visit his father’s deathbed and take over the sinister family business. As a corporate hegemony that would make Donald Trump blush, Oscorp reigns supreme over the New York skyline, employing not just Gwen, but also an engineer named Max (Jamie Foxx), who crosses paths with Spider-Man in an encounter that will have fateful, if not fatal, reverberations. Granted, there are at least two genuinely breathtaking set pieces to be admired here, including a climactic, emotional gut-punch of a scene set in a clock tower toward the end of the film, and the transformation of Max into his own shimmering, translucent alter ego. (Both Foxx and DeHaan deliver promising turns in their respective good guy/bad guy personas.)
Whereas the chief pleasure of the first Amazing Spider-Man was the cuddly chemistry between Garfield and Stone, here they generate fewer sparks than questions, namely how a 30-year-old and 25-year-old despite their proven and prodigious talents, can be expected to play recent high school graduates with any degree of credibility.