Written by Cherelle Rand
Photo from Flickr
**SPOILER ALERT** This article contains spoilers for “The Amazing Spider-Man 2”
Marc Webb, director of the first “The Amazing Spider-Man” film, comes to us again with a lackluster sequel.
After an action-packed prologue that shows Richard (Campbell Scott) and Mary Parker (Embeth Davidtz), Peter’s parents, on the run from OSCORP and their untimely deaths, the film picks up where the first one left off, with Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) and his girlfriend Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) graduating from high school.
Life is going on as normal. Peter continues his second job as the wise-cracking, sass-mouthed Spider-Man. Aunt May (Sally Field) tries to move on after Uncle Ben’s death. Gwen is still doing work study at OSCORP. And oh yeah, Peter keeps seeing the ghost of Captain Stacy (Dennis Leary). The latter is obviously meant to foreshadow the death of Gwen Stacy. Seeing the ghost of the captain and remembering his words, Peter once again ends his relationship with Gwen. But of course, the couple doesn’t stay apart for long. Most of the film is about Peter and Gwen and their relationship; at times it feels more like a romantic drama than a superhero flick.
It’s only because of the villains that the feeling goes away. During a car chase scene, with Peter battling Russian thug Aleksei Sytsevich (Paul Giamatti), who will later become the idiotic villain, The Rhino, he saves Max Dillon (Jaime Foxx), a nerdy, unhinged, electrical engineer. Max becomes obsessed with Spider-Man, making a wall shrine of him that consists of newspaper clippings and photos of the webcrawler. It’s after a tragic accident where he is electrocuted and falls into a tank full of electric eels at OSCORP that he becomes the villain Electro.
But one villain was unfortunately not enough for Marc Webb, and that’s one of the reasons the film suffers. Webb kills off the demented Norman Osborn (Chris Cooper) and brings in his son Harry (Dane DeHaan). The “Osborn curse,” a disease in the family bloodline, has killed Norman after turning him into a grotesque, greenish creature with goblin hands and has now afflicted Harry. Norman explains how he tried but failed to cure himself of the disease for decades. He passes his research on to Harry before dying.
Webb for some reason decides to speed up Harry symptoms and the character quickly becomes obsessed with finding a cure, to the point of injecting himself with spider serum. The procedure backfires and instead he turns into the hideous and notorious Green Goblin. Frankly, it’s rushed and sloppy. It’s hard to come to terms with Harry becoming evil so fast when just a scene ago he was happily stone skipping with Peter. It would have made more sense for Webb to stay true to the comic storyline and have Norman become the Goblin.
In the end, while there was a decent amount of action, the sequel was more of a step down than up. The film was too long, not paced well and it suffered from lazy writing, plotting and an overwhelming number of characters. A few of the actors, particularly Garfield, overacted in many scenes. Vulnerability is not a feeling he understands. He should have taken notes from Field and Foxx, who were the saving graces of the film. The cinematography was drastically different from the first one and not for the better.
One can only hope that the next two “The Amazing Spider-Man” installments will not be as dull as this one.
