The Amazing Spider-Man 2
How many times can one person say Oxford in a single sentence? Well strap in cause this film will test those limits.
This is the most disappointing of the Spider-Man films, as it had the potential to be amazing. Once again in the Webb duology the only truly good thing about this cinematic foray into the web head’s story is the core relationship between Peter and Gwen. Yet unlike the first film, the other components surrounding this aren’t fine or even passable they’re actively harming the quality of the film.
Garfield and Stone continue to be absolutely insatiable as Peter and Gwen, both producing performances that are far above the quality of this film. While their “will the won’t they” is very heavy handed basing it around Peter’s promise to her dad works well for me, as it’s clearly eating Peter up inside being torn between two options. Webb just has a talent for directing these small romcom moments and that’s where this film shines.
All this push and pull however leads to one of my favourite Spider-Man moments brought to screen: the death of Gwen Stacy. This scene is beautifully horrific, the tragedy of the situation and how heartbreaking it is comes through in the outstanding performances but also the score and cinematography, it’s truly one moment in the film where everything comes together seamlessly to produce something incredible.
Outside of this, the movie is all over the place. The one other thing that is done sort of well is the heart-to-heart moments between Peter and Aunt May, however this isn’t due to great writing it’s just another instance of the performances elevating a bad script. There’s numerous violations of good screenwriting in this film, Aunt May’s weird nursing plot line, Harry Osborn’s accelerated insanity, the awful parent subplot. But the worst offender has to be Max Dillon.
Electro in this film had potential to be a great villain, a man who was ignored and neglected by society so much that it pushed him to the brink and once he finally gets noticed for doing bad the attention is so infectious he can’t stop. Instead what were presented with is this over-the-top and completely on the nose representation of a man who feels like no one notices him, to the point where he sings to himself Happy Birthday and calls out every time someone knows his name.
The worst thing about this is that it’s played for jokes. The serious tone that was so unique about the first film is absent here and it makes what could’ve been such a sad story, a bad attempt at comedy. Electro is just wasted potential both of the character and of the acting of Jamie Foxx who can’t do anything to save this role.
Technically this film isn’t any better. It has some of the worst edited action scenes ever, pair that with the lacklustre direction of these scenes, and any action scene becomes a slog to get through. Minus the power station scene which was quite well done. This might also be the worst Hans Zimmer score to exist but also being quite a fun score at the same time. There’s moments where the score shines and it really enhances the grandeur of the scenes but then there’s atrocities like the music behind the Time Square scene, where out of nowhere suddenly these creepy voices start shouting at Max despite this being non-diegetic but we’re supposed to believe he can hear it? It’s awful either way, the voices are so distracting that it pulls you out of the film.
Accompanied by this awful score is equally awful needle drops. When Peter is trying to solve what happened to his parents and this indie Mumford and Sons music starts playing that feels completely misplaced and then two minutes later Kid Cudi starts playing. It’s so jarring and again is distracting from what’s going on. However perhaps the biggest achievement of this film is the absolute banger by Kendrick Lamar and Alicia Keys that plays over the credits of this film, I played that song way too much when this first came out