My Beef With Your Beef About ‘The Amazing Spider-Man 2'

Evaluating comic book movies vs. regular movies

This may be a little past the Prime Review Window for a movie, but it took me a while to process what I liked and what I didn’t like about this movie.

It also took me a while to process what I liked and didn’t like about the reviews about this movie.

With a critics’ Tomatometer rating of 53 percent and an audience rating of 73 percent, Rotten Tomatoes shoes a very quick look at the difference between how critics and audiences perceive comic book movies.

Particulary ones that involve Spider-Man.

[Full disclaimer: I liked TASM2. I liked it a lot. A top superhero movie for me. But I’ll work to be as unbiased as I can.]

Now, I understand that audiences are usually more forgiving than critics when it comes to blockbusters, especially blockbusters including superheroes. That’s going to be a given because, at this point, I do believe there is some truth to the “if you make a superhero movie, they will come” idea.

It’s going to sell tickets. A lot of them. But audiences don’t necessarily have to love it. And with viewers giving 73 percent and a 7.2 Metacritic scores, they certainly liked something.

Meanwhile, critics are at the RT’s 53 percent and the Metacritic score of 53 (of 100), they seem to be on par with clearly not liking something.

So what is it?

On RogerEbert.com, Christy Lemire said: “The sporadic moments of recognizable human contact and emotion are the only ones in this latest episode of the soaring web slinger that truly take flight.”

Peter Travers of Rolling Stone said: “The last third of the movie is a shambles of FX overkill, frenzied editing and desperate plot contrivances that make you wish there’ll never be an Amazing 3.”

The cutline for the Slate review by Dana Stevens on TASM2 is “Too many villains, too few reasons for existing.”

And there are others just like these. There are also many that do like it, which is why it’s split down the middle.

And I don’t mean to call these journalists out on their opinions, it’s certainly their opinion and job to write how they feel about it. Far be it from me to say you’re wrong and I hate you. It’s your job, you’re doing it. All’s well.

But I wonder if there’s a misunderstanding about what these films are really supposed to be and some simply haven’t adapted yet.

For one, I went in expecting to see too many villains because I had read that there were, and I came out of the theater not feeling that at all.

Let’s all remember what Too Many Villains actually looks like (I raise you “Spider-Man 3”). That was the bar example of throwing the kitchen sink at a last effort. They knew they weren’t getting more than a third from their actors and they wanted to do as much as they could.

(Let’s also remember true frenzied editing: Sorry, Ang Lee’s “Hulk.”)

I understand the motive, but the result on the screen was hard to stomach.

TASM2, on the other hand, was a staging movie.

It introduced audiences to the idea of Green Goblin and Rhino (even teasing him at full-force at the end, which many hated), but Electro was absolutely the main villain here and it felt like it on the screen.

The Amazing Spider-Man series has felt to me like a much better representation of what the Web Slinger was in the comics, while still bringing him into the real world. Everything from the fighting style, the sarcastic comments that were extremely prevalent on the page, to the original relationship with Gwen Stacy.

This was Spidey on the page brought to life, and I never got that from the Tobey McGuire series, even if I do appreciate what he did for the character and superhero movies in general.

But if it is a much better representation of Spider-Man, the comic-book character, then it needs to be taken as so, and not compared to others.

Spider-Man will never be “The Dark Knight.” It won’t happen, it doesn’t need to happen. And I wonder if critics are trying to compare it to that fantastic trilogy.

The comics also tended to tease characters and other villains much more frequently than the movies do. And, yes, I know it’s a different platform, but if you try to look at it as if they are actually much more similar, teasing Gobby and Rhino makes more sense.

In the comics, the most well-known villains of Spidey’s universe weren’t all-star villains from the get-go. They didn’t get up and become great. They worked at it and after being foiled by the Wall Crawler enough times, became really good and a huge test of the hero’s resolve and skill.

That’s what made the Sinister Six so exciting to see in the comics. They were all really good when they got together, but not good enough to take him singlehandedly.

So they banded together (with the help of the Gentleman, or Gustav Fiers—the man with the hat from the end of TASM2), and really put Spider-Man to the test.

And it was sweet!

It appears to me like Marc Webb and Sony/Marvel are trying to go the comics’ route of getting to the huge villain team-up and, although we’ve never seen it done on the screen before, it’s not something to fear.

So I hope that if you are a fan of the movies (or want to be, but believe your local/national critics too much), I suggest picking up some of the comics, especially the classics (Google Steve Ditko and John Romita, Sr.). I think you’ll see the movies in a better light or even better light if you already liked it.

And if you’re a critic. It’s fair to review movies of the typical genres and compare them to their predecessors and competition only. Most of the time, movies start and end on the screen, save for the book-adaption movies.

But superhero movies come with an added level of research needed: the source material. Hundred of thousands of comic books in various titles and forms. Those need to be looked at too when judging these movies.

That’s where they were born, after all.