Now, I've allowed myself to sit on this one for a couple of reasons. Namely A) my new job keeps me pretty busy and I've found less time to do anything non-work related that doesn't involve sleep, and B) this film is apparently really polarizing...and I don't really get why.
Okay, that's not true, I do understand it and I even have a few problems with it myself. I'm not particularly fond of how Norman Osborn - one of the greatest villainous movers and shakers of the Marvel universe - was cast aside for the sake of his son. By that same token, Harry is a great deal distanced from several iterations of the character in comics, and he does effectively fit the role he was meant to fill...mostly. But more on that as we go on.
The story picks up not long after The Amazing Spider-Man, with Peter Parker (once more taken on by Andrew Garfield) and his lady love Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) preparing to graduate from High School...with Peter, unfortunately, being caught up in his duties as a superhero and nearly missing the ceremony. During the chase to prevent a crook (Paul Giamatti) from stealing plutonium from OsCorp, Peter saves the life of a man by the name of Max Dillon (Jamie Foxx) who quickly develops an obsession with the Wall Crawler. And while Peter is able to save the day effectively and get to graduation just in the nick of time, he finds himself haunted by visions of Captain George Stacy (Denis Leary) who he has failed to keep his promise to.
From here, the narrative splits its time between Peter and Gwen yo-yoing between being in a relationship and not being in a relationship, Peter trying to deal with not only the rise of Max Dillon into Electro, and him reconnecting with boyhood chum Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan). But that isn't all, believe it or not! Gwen is offered a scholarship to Oxford (meaning she might have to leave Peter behind to pursue her dream), Harry learns from ailing father Norman (Chris Cooper) that he's dying and that he is also dying of the same disease. The only cure, Harry determines, is a vial of Spider-Man's blood. But also, the OsCorp Board of Directors is trying to shove Harry out and take over the company themselves and Peter still finds out a little bit more about the fate of his parents and what caused them to run away, culminating in...
...yeah, I can agree with the people that say there's a bit too much going on here.
However, this doesn't really keep the film from being enjoyable. Far from it, in fact. Much like the films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it's done to set up future projects. While it is nice and it whets our appetites for all of that, it is important to focus on the narrative of now rather than later on, which this film manages to do well enough. Mostly, anyway.
Andrew Garfield comes back into the role of Spider-Man and Peter Parker, and I will say that he plays both sides of the coin masterfully. Right from the start, he's being snarky and cracking jokes while dispensing justice to the criminal element of New York. This is who Spider-Man is supposed to be, not some awkward, geeky dork who happens to be stuffed into a Spider-Man suit - I'm looking at you, Tobey Maguire. Actually, to be truthful, Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker is perfect...for all of the first Raimi Spider-Man before he gets the Spider bite. While Peter Parker was indeed the awkward, nerdy dweeb of a man-child before he was bitten, Tobey's Peter never actually evolves from that point and even delves right into the "dear God, this man is creepy" territory. Garfield is not only better, but has the character down far, far better.
Beyond just the costumed snarky joke machine that Spider-Man is, we see more of the scientific mind that is supposed to drive Peter Parker. In his first fight with Electro, one of his webshooters gets blown apart by the electric current. So, to circumvent this, he actually works on ways to increase the resistance to electrical charge. It's one of the things I genuinely love about Garfield over Maguire. In the Raimi films, of course, the focus was less on the science (because, Sam, someone creating webshooters is just unbelievable! Now somebody's entire biology being overwritten to given them natural spinnerets overnight, that's just fine!), and I'm glad that's something that the Webb films have brought back. Because Peter Parker is a science based hero (even if 99.9% of all the "science" in comics is fantastically ridiculous), and he has often fallen back on science in the comics to solve his problems.
Seriously, the guy's like Batman, but with a soul. (Yes, I went there.)
Also returning this time is Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy. And, not one to fit the stereotype of the damsel in distress, Stone's Gwen Stacy continues to be a complete and total badass. Indeed, a lot of Gwen's development in this film either averts or inverts the usual tropes with superhero girlfriends. She gets an opportunity to go to Oxford and it looks like Peter, not her, will have to work around her schedule, rather than the other way around. She is the one who comes up with the plan to magnetize Peter's webshooters for his fight against Electro. She refuses to play the yo-yoing between being in a relationship and not being in a relationship with Peter, as I feared that his film was going back to the "will they, won't they?" nonsense from the Raimi films. Not so, and I'm immensely happy about that.
Also, the chemistry between the two leads is absolutely perfect, as it was in the first film. Seriously, I feel like I might actually get diabetes from watching how sickeningly sweet Garfield and Stone are. It is abundantly obviously in virtually every scene these two are in how much they love one another, which makes her death at the end of the film all the more heartbreaking.
...oh, that isn't a spoiler! 1973 was over forty years ago! Read a Wikipedia article!
The event is all the more soul-crushing because of their chemistry (both on and off screen), and Garfield's performance from the elation at thinking that he's saved her, up to the moment when he realizes that he has not and we see him broken down almost completely - even to the point of giving up being Spider-Man for a far more believable and sympathetic reason than in Spider-Man 2 - it's just another event in a long string that makes their entire romance, for all of its high points and it's tragedy, all the more believable. Peter Parker loses the love of his life in that bell tower, and the performance lets you feel every ounce of that anguish as his soul is torn asunder by it.
But hey, Peter, at least you have Mary Jane...who will erase your marriage through a deal with Satan...
But those are the main leads. The rest of the cast brings solid, if not really good performances. Aunt May (Sally Field) in particular deserves important note, and it's one again that I have to bring up a comparison to the Raimi films. I find that Field's May Parker is far more believable and like able as a character. Sure, Rosemary Harris's Aunt May in the first three films was essentially the perfect, idealized version of your Grandmother. She never seemed to be all that troubled for more than short parts of the films and seemed only there to provide exposition or a schmaltzy story for us to all cough at the awkwardness of the writing. It's very clear that she cared for Peter, but she seemed more like a two-dimensional cardboard cut out of the Grandmother stereotype than an actual character.
Field's May, on the other hand, struck me as far more three-dimensional in this film. She is worried about how she's going to put Peter through college and doesn't know how she's going to manage with Ben being gone. However, she's not going to take the Maguire approach and mope, taking classes in order to become a nurse so she can help keep her home in order and help further Peter's education. And she still manages to be supportive of Peter and help inspire him both before and after Gwen's death. My only gripe with her at all, and I mean at all (seriously, I love Sally Field and her interpretation of May) is that - like the first Amazing film - they have the crazed implications that she knows that Peter is Spider-Man...which they reinforce near the end of this one.
What exactly is that a build up towards? Why doesn't she just tell him?
Jamie Foxx's Electro is next on the block and...feels a little rushed. Now, mind you, they had a lot to cram into the film, but I felt as though his development from obsessed fanboy to raging psychopath could have been given a little more time to fully blossom. That being said, I don't really find Electro sympathetic as many have tried to make him out to be. At first? Yeah, we've all had a little hero worship go to our heads once and a while. But once he starts taking the Dr. Manhattan power set and killing people who get in his way...I'm a little less than sympathetic.
Kind of like Loki in The Avengers. Betrayed by your old man and lied to your entire life? Yeah, you'd have a right to be pissed. Go to a planet that had nothing to do with it and start killing people with your mystical glowing stick? Bit too far.
The secondary villain of the piece comes in the form of Harry Osborn, childhood chum of Peter's from grade school (who was oddly never mentioned before), who learns from his ailing father Norman that the disease that is killing him is hereditary. Thus, Harry attempts to seek out a cure...first going with trying to convince Spider-Man to give him some of his blood, and then breaking into OsCorp's special projects to get vials of venom from the spiders that bit Peter.
Main problem with this - where exactly do you get off killing Norman Osborn? Y'know...the guy who murdered Gwen Stacy, manufactured the entire Clone Saga (somehow) to drive Peter Parker completely insane, at one point took over all of the Marvel Earth and shot both Valeria and Franklin Richards point blank with a handgun, and when he learned that Doc Ock had swapped bodies with Spider-Man he did everything he could to make Ock's life a living Hell...
...wow, my nerd is showing, isn't it? The point is, Norman Osborn. Deserved way, way better than this. But I can look past that.
Harry himself is alright. There's obviously some Daddy issues (again, Norman Osborn is his father) and a horrific desperation in him as he wants to find a cure for the disease. While we do see Peter's point in his moral questioning over whether or he should give his blood to Harry (given what cross-species genetics did in the last film), Harry's pain and anger at the rejection is all the more sad and terrible because of his desperation...and leads to some unfortunate consequences that have already been brought up in this review. I'm also glad that, not unlike the first film, Harry wasn't killed off at the end of the film as he very well could have been. Of course, it's a set up for the Sinister Six film, but I'm still quite behind the idea of keeping villains alive at the end of superhero films (something that the Raimi films, comparing again, failed to do repeatedly) because of other stories that could be told.
That all being said, Harry looks absolutely ridiculous as the Goblin. I know people want to laugh at the William Dafoe Power Rangers outfit, but I had to stifle a laugh when Harry came onscreen. They're going for the Ultimate look, which I get, but he just looks adorable. I really just want to go "Who's gonna go kill Spider-Man? You are! You are, aren't you? Yes, you are!" in that annoying baby-talk voice people use on their dogs any time I see him. If it weren't for the lead up to Gwen's death, you couldn't even call the guy menacing. Just hilarious.
And also, to everyone who's mentioning that Rhino (again, Paul Giamatti) is the third villain in this film...he's not. He's comic relief, and he really shouldn't be taken as anything else (at least until the third film, which he is slated to be in). I've heard that fans of the Rhino were actually rather pissed about his sudden cameo in the beginning and the all of two minutes he appears in the end in costume. My only rebuttal to this is...there are fans of the Rhino?
Seriously? The Rhino?
Also, Felicia Hardy (Felicity Jones) and J. Jonah Jameson (Sir-Not-Appearing-In-This-Film) make cameos, but besides the two mythology gag jokes with the latter, they're not really of note.
The only real problems I have with the whole, besides it trying to fit a bit too much for it's britches, is one thing. The scenes with the planes should have been cut. Electro has control of New York's power grid (somehow) and it's a race against the clock to stop him and save the city. The stakes are already ridiculously high. I mean over the top levels. Throwing in a new element of characters who have no bearing on the plot and who we haven't had time to see development of doesn't allow us to care about whether they live or die. They're NPCs under a bad DM, essentially.
But really, besides that problem (and really, that's really the only problem I had), I really like this movie. I like the first Amazing Spider-Man more, but I definitely would take this film over any of the Raimi trilogy by far.
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is now in theaters from Marvel Entertainment, Columbia Pictures, and Sony Pictures.
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