A couple weeks back, I saw Captain America: The Winter Soldier. I thought it was an excellent flick, and one of the best superhero action movies I had ever seen. It's really a golden standard on how to pull off a superhero on screen and still do it in a interesting way. But I'm not here to gush about that great movie, I wanna discuss The Amazing Spider-Man 2.
I hated this movie.
If Captain America: TWS was a golden standard on superheroes on the silver screen, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 should be the personal manual for any budding filmmaker on how not to pull it off. I shouldn't really say filmmaker though, because technically and theatrically speaking, this movie is insanely well made. The film is shot and directed beautifully; in certain scenes it looks like a comic book on screen, even more so The Avengers did. The actors all play their parts incredibly well, with particular highlights given to Andrew Garfield (who guarantees with this film that he is not only the best screen Spider-Man, but the best interpretation of the character outside of the comics EVER) and Dane Dehaan, who is probably my favorite Spidey villain since Doc Ock. The Spider-Man costume is the best superhero costume I've ever seen in a movie, and lends itself well to the action sequences, which are great. The problems stem from the screenplay, which needed some serious, serious rewrites.
I could spend hours talking about the inconsistencies in the plot, the absolute lack of character motivations, the cringe-worthy and sometimes laughably bad dialogue (I seriously laughed pretty hard at some of the lines), and the wasted potential of what could have been a great Spider-Man film. The film feels like 3 movies slammed together at 100 miles per hour, and it creates a horrible, mish-mashed crash of a plot. We have to juggle Peter and Gwen's relationship problems (which are so time-consuming and wasteful that it feels like a first draft), Harry Osborn's problems, Peter and Harry's friendship (which should have been set up in the first film), Electro's shenanigans (if anyone who has seen the movie is reading this, can you honestly and truly tell me why he is even in this thing? If you take him out of the film, it changes nothing whatsoever. Think about it.), Peter's personal problems, whether it be from Aunt May or seeing Denis Leary's ghost at random times, and sometimes some superheroism that has nothing to do with anything. All these elements don't blend well because they don't belong in the movie together. If the first film's problem was that it had nothing going on, this one's is that it has extremely too much.
The filmmakers really should have decided to either do a movie about the Green Goblin, or a movie about Electro. They're trying to set up too much too fast, and it ends up blowing up in their face. Yes, we get it, you're trying to put together a Sinister Six movie, alright, but can't we let this flick be its own movie first? We'll have no interest in a Sinister Six film if the Spider-Man movies aren't interesting first.
I liked the scenes where Spider-Man was being the Spider-Man I know and I love from the comics, but that's all I really got out of this movie. It has a terrible screenplay (From the writers who brought you Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen!), underdeveloped concepts, and ombine that with a complete waste of Paul Giamatti and Chris Cooper, with hilariously bad Electro scenes (he gets his powers from evil electric eels who have demon faces, and they magically fix the gap in his teeth), you've got a pretty bad movie. Go see Captain America: The Winter Soldier again or, better yet, just wait for Guardians of the Galaxy.
4/10.
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