Grant:
When you’ve been a Spider-man fan for as long as I have, it’s impossible to view the films with an unbiased opinion. After all, it’s the knowledge of the source material that makes us as a viewing audience want to see these movies in the first place, and the last thing you want is a movie that seems to spit in the face of the world that it tries to bring to life on the big screen.
With that being said, I’m definitely not one of those “That wasn’t in the comics!! I’m pissed now!!” kind of guy. I didn’t mind that Raimi’s Spider-man had organic web shooters, or didn’t seem nearly as smart as the Peter Parker most of us grew up reading about, or that Tobey Maguire was neither great nor terrible at bringing my favorite superhero to life. “Spider-man 2” is one of my favorite super hero movies of all time and definitely set a Spider-man movie standard that its own sequel couldn’t even live up to. And while I did feel like a reboot was necessary due to the story direction that “Spider-Man 3” decided to take, 2012’s Amazing Spider-man wasn’t exactly the reboot I was hoping for.
It’s a movie that had as many pros as it did cons, and I could tell from the first trailers of Amazing Spider-man 2 that Sony and director Marc Webb were going to try to minimize the cons in the sequel and focus on the strengths. The result is a sequel that’s better than its predecessor, but not by much.
The effort to bring the world of Spider-Man to life on the big screen shows in ways even the original trilogy couldn’t fully capture. Spider-Man is constantly mouthing off throughout the movie, and his light-hearted wittiness is genuinely funny and serves as a relieving contrast to the constant moodiness of the original film. There are some great action scenes, especially towards the end of the film and the acting is consistently good throughout, even if Jamie Foxx ends up being somewhat underutilized in his role as Max Dillon/ Electro. There’s only been two of them, but Andrew Garfield captures both Peter Parker and Spider-Man in ways that Tobey Maguire couldn’t, and I look forward to what he brings to the role in future films.
Even though the film wisely avoids most of the pitfalls of having 3 villains in one movie, as well as some of the questionable decisions of the first movie, it still ends up having cons that can’t be ignored.
My first issue has nothing to do with the movie itself but how it was marketed. There were so many trailers/clips/exclusive scenes and early previews that were made public during the roll out for this film that I had a good grasp of the film from start to finish before I even watched it.
Getting into the film itself, for a movie with so much plot, it doesn’t really go anywhere. It seems like the studio was so focused on setting things up for future films that they forgot to make sure that this film was as good as it possibly could be. Jamie Foxx does a great job playing Electro, but you’re never given a clear reason for what motivates his actions and ultimately, none of them have as much impact on our hero as the other villains, despite him being the “main” bad guy. I don’t want to nitpick (the film is still enjoyable overall) but there’s a handful of hard-to-ignore elements that stop the movie from being, “Amazing.” Even still, I’m curious to see where all this set up leads, which is hopefully towards a film that can rival (or even surpass?) the unshakable standard that is “Spider-Man 2.” I give the film a 6.5 out of 10.
