Review: Amazing Spider-Man 2

(This review is spoiler free.)

Spider-Man has long been my favorite comic book character. Mainly because I identify with him. Nerdy kid who was picked on a lot in high school? Yep. I like to think I'd do better things if I had powers at first, but how he reacted could very well have been me at that age.

I started reading Spider-Man in the early 90's, just as the Clone Saga hit (unfortunately). I did my homework, though, and invested in a lot of back issues, so I'm very familiar with Spider-Man stories from the late 70's and 80's. There was also the Spider-Man animated series on at the time that I enjoyed.

Like many long time fans, I stopped reading Spider-Man (or buying any Marvel at all, really) after One More Day. While I've peeked into Superior Spider-Man, One More Day continues to sour me to the comics, sadly. I do, however, like to consume related media, such as the movies.

I got to see Amazing Spider-Man on its Thursday IMAX premiere. Nabbed the free poster that came with it (very nifty). At over 2 and a half hours, it's a hefty feature and needed every minute given how much they packed in.

Overall impression? Definitely better than Amazing Spider-Man and Spider-Man 3, but it sadly fails to topple either Spider-Man or Spider-Man 2. (I consider Spider-Man 2 as the best Spider-Man movie made to date, so you know how I rank them.) The film was not insanely horrible, as some have described, and even makes the cut as an okay movie. It's far from the quality Spider-Man deserves, though.

The Good:

The special effects are amazing. Seeing it in IMAX is very much worth it. Both fights with Electro are beautiful and the use of dubstep timing was a great trick. This isn't the yellow-green kind of pathetic Electro from his early years - this is the God-Tier Electro that several writers realized was his true potential as a villain.

Spider-Man moves like Spider-Man better than ever before. The way he dodges, jumps, and little tricks he does with his webbing are some of the best that's been brought to the screen. You can believe he was bitten by a radioactive spider.

The one-liners are snappy and well delivered. They got Spider-Man's humor down very well in this film and Andrew Garfield delivers them with the light-hearted tone they deserve.

Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy and Jamie Foxx as Electro. Both did very good jobs with the characters. Jamie Foxx in particular captures the awkwardness of Max Dillon before his transformation very well.

What Needs to be Improved:

Sally Field as Aunt May just doesn't work. She can't pull off the emotional gravity needed for some of the tragedy in the character. It really killed several scenes between her and Peter that should have been touching.

Andrew Garfield can't quite figure out how to be Peter Parker. He alternates between an "Aw, shucks" kind of personality that works well and a more outgoing joking character that doesn't. He doesn't remain consistent to how he presents Parker and it makes it a bit jarring when he changes modes.

They turned Dr. Kafka into a guy. Worse, he's played pretty horribly. I did not enjoy this change to a character I enjoyed reading about in the comics.

Gwen and Peter's relationship. They break up at the beginning of the movie (not a spoiler). That really kills a lot of emotional potential right there. Instead of seeing them grow closer and building on the relationship from the first, we go through a rehash of what we had in ASM1. Much better would have been if they'd stayed together and Gwen taken a more active role in helping Peter fight bad guys. There's a glimmer of this later in the film and I wish there was more of this. It would have made everything play out much better than how it went, with the character simply seeming to be in a predetermined fate.

Pacing and story focus. Like the first one, ASM2 skips over motivations and depth to get to the action. As a result, Max Dillon and Harry Osborn get very short scenes to establish motivations before BLAM they're evil! Spider-Man 2 set the bar for creating sympathetic villains by focusing on them before the circumstances of their creation. ASM2 uses a paint by numbers, "Okay, we've got a scene establishing this guy is a lonely loser. Next!"

And that brings to the final point: despite being over 2 and a half hours, the movie still feels too SHORT. A lot of time has been spent telling not very much story. It never lets things sink in or builds on the potential elements there, it just moves from piece to piece. Spider-Man 2, like the Avengers, let things breath so the audience could grasp what they were seeing. ASM2 just shoves you along a railway path, demanding your attention before you can comprehend what you've seen. It's not the only film to do this, of course, but it's not good film making.

I hope Amazing Spider-Man 3 is an improvement, but this reboot has a long way to go before it gets to Raimi's level or that of the MCU.