The Amazing Spider-Man 2 3D
Spider-Man! Spider-Man! Does whatever any other crappy comic book based movie can!
There are certain franchises that I have what can only be described as a dysfunctional relationship with. Like an abused spouse I get beaten and belittled, yet come crawling back in the vain hope that THIS time things will be different and the abuse will magically stop.
Spider-Man is exactly that kind of franchise and I have to say it might be time for me to give up on the relationship. Like most relationships the first few months were great (in this analogy represented by the original Tobey MacGuire movie) but had slipped down a steady slope of mediocrity and canon abuse. Each movie has a few points that are fun but the fun elements steadily diminish leading us to this remnant, representing the least fun movie of the franchise. I dread whatever they come up with next. I can only assume a movie so unfun that it sucks the fun out of the movies playing in the theaters adjacent to it.
(image courtesy of the Comic Book t shirt category)
If a few years ago you had told me that one day I would be rooting for Disney I probably would have either laughed or punched you out for impugning my integrity. I have always had an adversarial relationship with the Mouse that started at a security related issue in the Haunted House ride back in my childhood and has grown ever since (in 1987 I went to Grad Night at Disneyland with all of my high school “friends” who ditched me in the first 30 minutes, leaving me wandering the “happiest place on Earth” miserably by myself for 8 hours straight like a lost soul. The contrast was mind bending. That is one of the many childhood traumas that makes me the well adjusted adult I am now). In film in the past I have found them oppressive and formulaic, with little redeeming artistic value. As I work in the licensing industry Disney is a name spoken with fear and dread as they will literally hang you from a tree with a barbwire noose if they catch the slightest whiff of copyright infringement (even on images that should have been public domain 50 years ago).
Yet when shown what they have done with most of the Marvel movies I have to say they are really, really good. Spider-Man needs to be rescued from Sony by the lesser of two evils. When comparing this film too the infinitely superior Captain America: the Winter Soldier the contrast is startling. On paper the two movies should be at the same level. They are both sequels. They are both based on iconic Marvel super heroes. In fact Spider-Man is more beloved and has a richer backstory than Captain America. They both exceeded two hours in run time. So why then does this movie suck and the Winter Soldier rule? In fact rather than just list all the things I hated in this film let’s do a comparison, shall we?
1. Three times the villains =/= three times the fun. There is a weird belief in bad comic book movie making that adding more villains will automatically make the movie better. Joel Schumacher (one of the most hated men in the nerd world) proved that concept Batnipple wrong with Batman Forever and Batman and Robin. Villains are fun when they are developed like the heroes and have a personal axe to grind. Each time you add another one to the film you cut the amount of time one can spend on character development, making each one in turn that much more uninteresting. The good movies treat villains almost as importantly as the heroes. Sometimes more so in that you can have a team of heroes but only one villain (Magneto from X-Men, Khan from TWOK, Darth Vader). By adding more villains to this film you take away from the value of each one, resulting in a sum that is less than the individual parts (having Paul Giamatti speak with a Russian accent and hate Spider-Man for getting him arrested earlier is not an automatic good villain. What is this, the Rocky and Bullwinkle show?). Disney wisely opted to go with one great villain. These guys went with a bunch.
2. Have a linear plot without too much to distract from the story. I checked a bunch of other reviewers for this film and the most common joke made was something along the line of “What a tangled web they’ve weaved” or the like. Winter Soldier, while addressing some interesting social issues and having a couple of cool plot twists, had a story that did not verge off into Magical Tangentland every ten minutes. This movie is about what happened to Peter Parkers parents, how he got his powers, how another guy loved and felt betrayed by Spider-Man, Peter haunted by Gwen Stacy’s dead father, his romance with Gwen, Harry Osbourne dying of something and needing Spider-Mans blood, Harry Osbourne haunted by feelings of failure from his father, OsCorp business politics, Spider-Man being abused by the media, Aunt May keeping secrets from Peter, Aunt May’s feelings for Peter, and Harry feeling betrayed by Peter. The film has six different writing credits and it shows. In fact it looks like each one wrote about 20 minutes without ever talking to or meeting any of the others. Also can someone give Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci a job watching paint dry or something? How many crappy scripts are they going to ruin before the literature police show up and arrest them? For the record they did both Star Treks, Transformers Revenge of the Fallen, and Van Helsing. I can totally see why they are the best choice for a film with a $200 million budget.
3. Ease back on the romance. Ok, in the comic book I was always more of a Gwen Stacy fan than Mary Jane and love was always a part of Peter Parkers life but jeez, how much of this film is going to be taken up with freaking Gwen Stacy, her option to move to England, her romance with Peter, and the whole thing. I am for sure a fan of Emma Stone and like looking at her on the screen but I’m here to see Spider-Man fight some guy, not watch the two of them eat ice cream. Notice that in Winter Soldier the romance was touched upon and then let rest easy in the background, secure in it’s knowledge that it had contributed just the right amount to the story.
4. No kids. Look, if we learned anything from The Phantom Menace it’s that kids in sci fi action movies suck. They generally suck as actors (not always but often), they take you out of the fantasy of the film into a legitimate concern for their safety (movies like this require suspension of disbelief, something that is hard to do when you see kids on the screen), and rarely add anything to the film. Do the producers really think that more kids are going to want to see this film because some eight year old is on the screen? Kids don’t want to be other kids in a Spider-Man movie. They want to be Spider-Man.
5. Treat the canon with SOME respect. I know I go off on this all the time, but every time you think it might be a good idea to go off canon in the interest of making the movie do something it really shouldn’t take a day to think about it and at the end of the day punch yourself in the balls really hard. If the canon change is worth a punch in the balls go for it. If not stick to the story as written. The fact is the best comic book movies try to stick to the comic book.
6. Don’t give any of your characters back stories that suck. You know, the nerdish guy who had some kind of accident and gained super powers has already been done. He’s called Spider-Man. The Electro back story was as tepid and lame as humanly possible. The whole Harry/Norman Osborne story sucked. They didn’t even bother with Rhino. If you had focused on one villain you could have had more time to develop something more interesting but that’s neither here nor there.
8. Avoiding the temptation to make your cast into a joke. This may or may not be petty but the director of this film is no joke named Mark Webb. Prior to getting on board with the new Spider-Man franchise he had directed absolutely nothing of note. This is purely speculation but I would be willing to bet at some point while considering who to put in charge of this someone at Sony said “This guys last name is Webb! That is fate! Also he must be a huge expert in Spider-Man with a name like that. The fans will love it!” and then proceeded to do more coke. Notice Winter Soldier did not hire a guy named Anthony Shield.
8. Soundtrack. Regular readers might recall me saying I never even notice soundtracks unless it is painfully obtrusive and annoying, and I will just say I haven’t “noticed” a soundtrack this painfully obtrusive in years. It was like sitting in the window seat on a plane and the guy next to you is a 300lbs homeless fan of garlic. The music used in this film would have embarrassed the creators of the 1978 Battlestar Galactica. Again, I never even noticed the soundtrack from Winter Soldier.
I could go on. Bottom line is in my opinion Sony should just sell the license back to Disney and let them make great movies instead of mediocre convoluted BS. Once I am done flagellating myself for coming down in favor of Disney I will feel a lot better about that statement.
The story. There is a lot of potential spoiler material so I am going to go easy on it (also it was so complex I am having a hard time keeping it in order). However a good amount will sneak into this so SPOILER ALERT. Skip ahead to the stars. Spider-Man (Andrew Garfield-the Social Network, I’m Here, Unscripted) starts things off by stopping a hijacking of a truck carrying plutonium (which we are told in one of the lamest plot devices ever is both radioactive and explosive. While the explosive part is sort of true it is not going to blow up like the movie implied. Also plutonium is a solid on this planet, not a liquid. Bad science makes me mad/sad). The hijacker is Paul Giamatti (Saving Private Ryan, Private Parts, the Illusionist) who will later resurface as the Rhino.
While saving the plutonium Spider-Man also saves Max Dillon (Jaime Foxx-Collateral, Django Unchained, Ray), a nebbish electrical engineer working for OsCorp. Max becomes obsessed with Spider-Man and is his biggest fan. Spider-Man goes back to Peter Parker and his college graduation with girlfriend Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone-Crazy Stupid Love, the Croods, Gangster Squad). They break up for some reason (I think Peter was too worried about her getting hurt and she was pissed off because she’s a big girl and doesn’t need protection? Given that her father died in the last movie 10 feet from Spider-Man I would think his concerns might sit more heavily with her than that, but whatever).
Meanwhile Norman Osborne (Chris Cooper-The Patriot, Adaption, the Muppets) locks down his Father-of-the-Year award by telling his son Harry (Dane DeHaan-Chronicle, Lawless, Kill Your Darlings) how disappointed he is in him and also that Harry is soon going to die of the same ill defined genetic disease (not sure what they called it or if they even gave it a name. For the purposes of this review I am going to call it Shmerpes). Norman dies (without becoming the Green Goblin) and Harry takes over, dealing with internal corporate politics (fascinating, really) before the first symptoms of his Shmerpes kicks in.
Gwen works at OsCorp and meets Max on an elevator. Max’s boss tells him to stick around and work when the entire company is going home over the death of Norman. Max has to perform a high tech repair (known as plugging two cables together) and has an accident where he falls into (oh God I wish I were kidding) a tank filled with mutant electric eels, turning him into Electro.
(You know, a guy gets bitten by a radioactive animal and gains the animals powers has already been done. He’s called Spider-Man. This is just lazy writing all around.)
So Electro comes out and is attacked by cops and beaten down by Spider-Man. Meanwhile Harry is desperately searching for a cure for Shmerpes and discovers the fact that Peter Parkers father Richard was working with Norman on some mutated spiders but they were all destroyed. For some reason Harry thinks this venom is a cure and also that Spider-Man must have gotten his powers from these spiders. (Oh, yeah. Radioactive spider venom now has healing properties (cough cough Wolverine cough cough).)
So Harry asks Peter to ask Spider-Man for some of his blood in order to cure his Shmerpes but for some reason Spider-Man knows more about his blood than the entire OsCorp research team and tells Harry that the blood is too dangerous (um, Harry, Peter’s best friend, is dying. What does Spider-Man think the blood is going to do? Make Harry double dead?).
Things go haywire from there. Harry loses control of OsCorp and busts Electro out of the facility where they are torture-experimenting on him (?). They get the company back and Harry discovers that the guy who took over had the spider venom all the time. He takes some of it at gunpoint but it combines with his Shmerpes to do something bad (?). He more or less collapses and only by sticking himself into the Green Goblin suit (it just happened to be lying around) can he survive. Everyone decides they hate Spider-Man for assorted ill defined reasons and wreaking the whole city is worth getting revenge.
The stars:
Action was pretty good. They definitely captured what it’s like to be and/or fight against Spider-Man. Two stars. Visuals and special effects were great. I really liked the look of Electro and the big fight scene between him and Spidey was awesome. Two stars. I really liked Dane DeHaan as Harry Osbourne. He really brought as much heat as he could to the film. One star. As a purist I should probably hate the new Rhino suit but honestly I loved it. Extremely cool. I also loved the new Goblin suit. Too bad we never got more than three minutes of either of then. Two stars. Emma Stone is very easy on the eyes and played her role well. One star. If you don’t feel the need for character development and a coherent story this film is fun. Two stars. Total: ten stars.
The black holes.
Too many villains dammit. Give me a bad guy to get to know and sink my movie going teeth into. One black hole. Way too much going on in the story. One black hole. Way too much romance. Do we really care that Gwen is considering moving to England so much that we have to go with her on her interview? One black hole. The whole parents sub plot and his fathers part in creating Spider-man was also totally unnecessary and stupid (actually those three last words describe most of the sub plots). One black hole. Massive plot holes. How is it spiders created by Richard Parker are still alive to bite 14 years later? How did he get a secret lab built in an abandoned subway platform? Did OsCorp build it? If so why did they not come get all his research after he betrayed them? How is the lab fully functional and spotless with biological samples in Petri dishes 14 years later? How is it Peter and Harry are best friends when they haven’t seen each other in 8 years? The list goes on. One black hole. Going off canon in really stupid directions. One black hole. Bad science. One black hole. The soundtrack felt like I was wrestling Shmoo and lost. Smothering. One black hole. Total: eight black holes.
A total of two stars, and me once again frustrated with what could have been. The potential of this film was great but instead they just did the typical Hollywood design-by-committee pap. When I look a this film and the convoluted yet horribly simplified story, the massive special effects, and the lack of real character development I realize that it was clearly made with overseas audiences in mind. This sort of thing will go over great in China. Should you see it? Sure. It’s fun and it’s Spider-Man. However will you want to see it a second time? I do not. Bottom line I am eager to see Winter Soldier a third time but given the prospect of seeing this one again I’d rather watch Tobey MagGuire on DvD. For me that is the mark of a good or bad movie. Date movie? Sure, why not? I don’t think this will get her pants off but it will not keep her pants on, if you get my meaning. Bathroom break? I think the scene with Peter discovering his fathers lab is totally disposable. Either that or any of the scenes with Aunt May. In the comic she was the most boring part of the story and nothing in this film improves upon that. At 142 minutes you will probably need a break somewhere.
Thanks for reading. I’ll try to get something else watched soon. In truth I saw this Thursday night and have been putting off writing it. I know when I find myself reading old blog posts in order to correct grammar errors I really don’t want to write it, and the mundanity of a franchise I used to love does not fire my enthusiasm. Feel free to post comments on this film or my review here, or send me an email if you have off topic questions or suggestions to [email protected]. Also join the dozens of followers I have on Twitter @Nerdkungfu. Thanks and have a great night.
“The Infamous Dave” Inman
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.