With the relative success of the first movie in the Marc Webb directed reboot of the franchise, there was a whole lot of hope and anticipation wrapped into the run up to the release of The Amazing Spider-Man 2. However, the bad news is that the film fails to deliver on so many levels that it’s easily the biggest let down in the recent spate of Marvel movie excellence, making it one of just a few super hero movies that just aren’t worth the DVD investment alongside the likes of Daredevil.
While it’s nowhere near as bad as the monumentally bad Ben Affleck fail, it does disappoints all too often, leaving you with little confidence for the rest of the franchise if it continues and a complete inability to recommend the DVD in any real way. It’s already picked up a fair few bad reviews, in fact since it’s cinematic release on the 2nd May 2014 it’s gone on to pick up an average score of 53/100 from Metacritic and 53% from Rotten Tomatoes, and this isn’t going to be a high scoring review either.
Released on DVD, Blu-ray and digital download on the 2nd May 2014 it arrived with just as much celebration and spectacular imagery from Marvel as hits like the spectacular Captain America: Winter Soldier and the equally brilliant Avengers Assemble. However, it’s turned out to be a fraction of the epic movies that they were, with the biggest culprits in its undoing being a weak script, poor direction and some genuinely woeful casting, which has created a film that does as much as Spider-Man 3 to undermine the excellence of the original comic books and cartoon TV series.
There’s not a great deal wrong with the storyline as such, as it takes a lot from the Marvel comics that came before it, but the delivery of the story lets it down massively. It picks up not too long after the lizard battling first movie in the reboot series as Peter and Gwen are just about to graduate from college. The arrival of a very stupid looking Russian mafia maniac called The Rhino sets in motion a series of events that leads to the appearance of a succession of well known Spider-Man baddies for the young web slinger to face.
This in itself is a core reason the film fails to live up to its hype. With so many baddies vying for screen time none of them get the attention they deserve to deliver something special. The casting of Paul Giamatti (12Years A Slave) as The Rhino is a sheer waste of acting might. He’s just the wrong person for the role, looking equally daft in his skinhead maniac incarnation as he does in the terribly designed rhino suit.
If you step back from the dire delivery throughout, the use of The Rhino as a medium to introduce Max Dillon/Electro into the mix isn’t that bad on the face of things, but the build up, reveal and development of the electrically charged baddie is poor. While we don’t think there’s much wrong with the casting of Jammie Fox in the role as such, he’s got a lot to answer for in terms of his performance, which is clumsy at best, and just plain unbelievable for the rest of the time.
Equally, casting Dane DeHaan (Kill Your Darlings) as Peter’s long-lost, boyhood friend Harry Osbourne is a lot more bearable than Giamatti as The Rhino, and in all fairness his performance for the majority of the film is OK enough. However, [spoiler alert for anyone that hasn’t seen the film] his eventual transformation into his alter ego The Green Goblin in nothing short of atrocious, looking like a cast-off from the make-up room floor of The Grinch.
Apart from looking atrocious, it also feels a bit rushed and hasn’t been given the attention to detail, styling and special effects it needs to really impress. It just adds to the contrived nature of the film, which seems to have been written into corners only for the writers to come up with a spurious plot addition to write their way out of them, which is completely unnecessary as the stories had already been written well enough by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko for the comic books that it’s been based on.
Andrew Garfield isn’t necessarily an appalling choice as Spidey, but his performance is tough to buy in to with so much bad direction to contend with. Peter’s stance switches all too easily between devil-may-care nonchalance and moody seriousness, making for a disjointed character that struggles to decide whether or not he’s an untouchable superhero, or a compromised vigilante that needs to consider the safety of the people he loves. One moment he’s cockily helping Gwen escape a building without a single thought for the potential of his plan to fail and the next he’s tying her up with his web shooters to stop her from flying into the face of danger.
It’s a similar problem to the most significant issue with the film overall as it frustratingly interlaces out-and-out idiocy that approaches Batman And Robin levels of stupid with poor attempts at tackling more serious subjects like death, genetic diseases and morality. It fools you into thinking that it’s wholeheartedly vapid only to whip out a serious surprise or two, which is pretty annoying considering the very nature of the origin storyline of Spider-Man and the death of his Uncle Ben.
Emma Stone (The Croods), is as good as Gwen Stacey in the second movie in the series as she was in the first, with the only real negative being that she looks a little too old to be believable as a college teen, although you could easily say the same for Andrew Gargield and his deeply furrowed brow. She delivers a solid performance and in all fairness some of her scenes with Peter Parker are the better ones in the movie, which, if anything, shows just how wrong Marc Webb has managed to get things.
The director may have just about managed to pull things off in the original reboot, but in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 he literally couldn’t have gotten it much more wrong if he’d been directing the cast of Police Academy 6 in the Marvel superhero storyline. Characters lack consistency and deliver some very odd performances, the styling is lacklustre and unimpressive and the overarching flow of the film is scattergun in the extreme.
There’s a very famous line from the Spider-Man comics that Webb has somehow missed in his approach to directing the film, “with great power, comes great responsibility”. For the second movie in the series he will have had the biggest say in the end result and instead of tirelessly striving for perfection he’s let it through as a flabby and daft clown of a film, which is pretty inexcusable from our point of view.
On the whole the special effects do little to make up for the movie’s shortcomings, despite their big budget credentials. It’s not that they’re bad as such, it’s just that they fail to really impress because the styling is so poor. It’s like everyone that had the potential to stand up for what’s right ducked out on their responsibility and as such we’re left with a movie that disappoints visually as much as it does on the casting, script and direction side of the equation.
If you’re looking at The Amazing Spider-Man 2 DVD and contemplating buying it under any circumstances other than for a film school thesis on how to ruin a much loved story, we’d probably advise against it. From a rental point of view, this is one for die hard Marvel fans to be disappointed with and talk endlessly about the nature of the fail. For anyone else, there’s plenty of other movies to watch, and Guardians Of The Galaxy will be out soon enough.
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 DVD review: 2/5
Review note – The Amazing Spider-Man 2 turned out to be the final film in the second series for the character. However, it only took a few years for Marvel to reboot it once again in Spider-Man: Homecoming starring Tom Holland in the title role.
