The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) **/*****
Early on in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 there are a handful of scenes where Spider-Man is doing some web-slinging and crime fighting through the skyline of New York City that are absurdly expensive-looking and absolutely thrilling to watch. They represent the most fully-realized and comic book-authentic images of Spidey that have appeared onscreen to date, and they would have gotten the film off to a good start, if they were actually how it opened. Instead though, the opening scene of this movie is an action scene featuring Spider-Man’s parents, from years earlier, that doesn’t really resonate because we don’t know what kind of people they were or even what they were up to during the sequence, and that serves as an early indication that the film would eventually get bogged down in a quagmire of plot and mythology-building. Which it does. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is kind of a chore to watch.
Before we turn this into a bitch-fest though, let’s address the aspects of the movie that worked, because there were a few of them — though they get so thoroughly overpowered by the surrounding crap that they don’t ultimately matter. As anyone who saw the first Amazing Spider-Man could tell you, Andrew Garfield is very well cast as the title character, who’s otherwise known as Peter Parker, and Emma Stone is very well cast as his love interest, Gwen Stacy. Their teenage romance made for the best bits of the first film, and their continued relationship drama is also the best part of this sequel. Not only are these two attractive and charming, but they’re able to handle dramatic material well, they both have excellent comic timing, and they even work well as a pair. Marc Webb couldn’t have asked for a better couple of young actors to direct.
Webb and his DP (Dan Mindel) provide the film with some pretty images too — and I’m not even talking about the big spectacle type stuff. The photography shines in the small moments, where the lights of Chinatown are accentuated with a smattering of non-abrasive lens flares during a dialogue scene, and whatnot. There’s a really strong relationship drama hidden somewhere inside of this superhero movie, but, unfortunately, the superhero stuff is all so big and loud that you have to look hard to find it. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is never less interesting than when Spider-Man and a super-villain are flying around the screen battling, and suddenly everything you’re looking at is animated by a computer and is carrying an element of unreality — and there’s a lot of that stuff here. Watching his final big battle with Electro (Jamie Foxx) is basically the equivalent of watching someone’s little brother play video games. So boring.
Which, it would seem, brings us to the bitching. Spider-Man and his girlfriend, and even his Aunt May (Sally Field), are all great characters played by actors who give great performances, but the villains here are just miserable — every one of them. We’ve mentioned Foxx’s Electro already, so let’s start with him. He’s a ridiculous cartoon character, even before he literally becomes a cartoon character. His character arc, and Foxx’s performance, both ape Jim Carrey’s Riddler from 1995’s Batman Forever basically down to the last beat. Electro is cheesy and embarrassing, and he doesn’t fit next to the scenes where Garfield and Stone are playing real people whatsoever. As a matter of fact, everything other than the relationship stuff in this film takes on the tone of all those awful comic book movies from the 90s. The Joel Schumacher-directed Batman stuff, The Shadow, etc. This wasn’t an era of comic books movies that anyone was asking to go back to, but here we are nonetheless. What a regression.
Dane DeHaan is similarly ridiculous as Peter’s old friend Harry Osbourne, who it’s no real spoiler to say also turns into a villain by the end of the film. Essentially you get one scene where Peter and Harry are established as being old friends, which the actors sell pretty well, and then in the very next scene Harry is well on his way to going crazy and turning into an over-the-top bad guy. Everything about the character is rushed, from his break with sanity, to his development of superpowers, to his confrontation with Spider-Man. This movie is packed with too much story and too many characters, so nothing gets the opportunity to get fully developed or to resonate. It doesn’t help matters that DeHaan’s performance is so completely nutso and does nothing to ground his loosely drawn character either. His Harry Osbourne is like a weird amalgam of Leonardo DiCaprio and Crispin Glover, with a dose of Nic Cage emoting thrown in for good measure, and he’s ridiculous every second that he’s on the screen. I can’t reiterate enough how awful the villains in this movie are. Paul Giamatti only shows up for a few minutes as Rhino, but he’s similarly over-the-top and awful in those few minutes, so he should share in the shame some too. As should Webb, because clearly some sort of mandate was given that everyone playing a villain should go as big and broad as possible, and it was absolutely the wrong call.
The original Spider-Man was so well-cast and competently directed by Webb that the general consensus coming out of that film seemed to be that the sequel might actually end up being a solid superhero movie, so long as it was shot from a script that was better than the jumbled mess of words that the first one used. Unfortunately for us, even though there was a change in writers, that didn’t happen — which shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, seeing as the new screenwriters brought on board were Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci. These are the same guys who wrote the coincidence-filled and logically-challenged scripts for projects like the recent Transformer movies and the Star Trek reboots, and all of their worst tendencies are once again on display here.
There are so many characters here who shouldn’t ever occupy the same space, but wind up doing so coincidentally because the plot requires it. There are bits of dialogue and entire scenes that shouldn’t exist for any logical reason, but do so anyway because they’re necessary for the script to get the characters to the next action sequence that was planned, or to fill the audience in on some over-complicated bit of plot that probably didn’t need to be there in the first place. The script for The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is both too complex, because it has too many components, and too simple, because none of those components get properly developed, and many of them fail to even make any sense when thought about for more than two seconds. To get into specifics would just be frustrating and spoilery, but you’ll know what we’re talking about if you see the movie. This isn’t the sort of stuff that can easily be ignored.
If Kurtzman and Orci are going to take the blame for the fragility of the story and the clumsiness of the character development, then they should also get credit for the fact that Amazing Spider-Man 2 is also kind of funny though. Too often big blockbusters like this try to shoe-horn in some comic relief and fail miserably, and that’s not what happens here — which is fortunate, because a dose of humor is pretty essential to the Spider-Man character. Whenever this movie goes for a joke, it generally lands, which is refreshing. Some of the success is due to the comic timing of Garfield and some of it is due to the comic timing of whoever the primary force in the editing room was, but some of it also has to be thanks to the jokes being funny on the page. Maybe we can use this as an opportunity to forgive these guys for the racist caricatures and bathroom humor of their second Transformers movie. Maybe.
What can never be forgiven though is whatever confluence of bad decision-making and terrible acting that led to the creation of the Dr. Kafka (Marton Csokas) character. Kafka is a mad scientist of sorts, who experiments on the Electro character after he gets apprehended following his initial public debut (he’s kept in a special prison that contains his electric powers, which was apparently already built and lying around just in case anyone ever got electric powers and decided to use them for evil), and he’s the most embarrassing thing I’ve seen show up in a mainstream movie for as long as I can remember. The Kafka character, as he’s written and performed by Csokas, has all the subtlety and believability of one of those old horror movie hosts that used to show up on public access television. He minces, he prances, he seems to be wearing lipstick for some reason, and it all adds up to one of the most senseless creations in comic book movie history. Csokas’ few small scenes are worse than anything Foxx or DeHaan does in this movie, they’re worse than any of the James Franco weirdness or the Tobey Maguire dancing in Sam Raimi’s third Spider-Man movie, and they might even be worse than anything that appears in any of the Schumacher Batman movies. In the coming years, this character is bound to become infamous, and will serve as the biggest bullseye to point at when you try to explain to people why you think The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is such a stupid, lame excuse for a summer movie. Spider-Man deserves better than what Sony is giving him. If anyone over there had any compassion for nerds, they’d hand the character’s film rights back over to Marvel.
