Okay, this is going to be a long one.
This entire review is basically one big SPOILER so either you don't care (and you shouldn't), or you've already seen it. Suffice it to say, the movie sucks, so you shouldn't care if you are spoiled. But, I go over like, 75% of the movie here and all the twists so...here is your warning.
PART 1
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
[spoiler]Let me start by saying this movie could have been worse. There are some good ideas here (given mostly very poor execution, but we’ll get into that), and, I actually enjoyed a few of the scenes, something I couldn’t really say about Amazing Spider-Man 1 at all. I was also annoyed out of my mind at several, and indeed, most of the movie.
Since these movies were originally created as an answer to the criticisms of Raimi’s Spider-Man 3 (it’s poor critical reviews and the passage of time prompting a reboot, lest Sony lose the rights to Spider-Man), it came as quite a surprise that this film made the same exact error. It had too many villains, and one felt incredibly tacked on. I am of course talking about…SPOILERS…the Green Goblin. NOT Harry Osborne—Harry Osborne was given quite a bit of development, and even though I found his backstory questionable at best (retroviral hyperplasia that is also genetic? Do the writers know what a retrovirus is? I dunno, maybe it’s a genetic susceptibility to a retrovirus regular people don’t have), and kind of dumb at worst (Peter and him used to be best friends before Harry got shipped off to boarding school for ten years, something not even mentioned once in the first movie, despite numerous chances to, as the entire plot revolved around Oscorp in that film as well), I at least have to admit we spent lots of time with Harry Osborne in this movie. But the Green Goblin himself, Harry’s alter ego, appears at the last minute, does his nefarious deed we all know is coming, and then…the movie kind of ends. Well, there is an extended, overly dramatic epilogue, but we’ll get to that.
The Venomification (?) of Green Goblin is exactly the sort of mistake you would think would be avoided in these scripts, but perhaps they can’t help themselves. After all, they have a sequel to set up here, and a spin-off universe to begin spinning-off (the Green Goblin and Rhino will return in The Sinister Six, presumably). But seriously: to repeat the biggest sin of Spider-Man 3 (far more erroneous than beatnik Peter, who is the greatest artistic invention of mankind) speaks to a sort of intense blindness in the creation of these things. Just toss everything together in a very loose chronological order and film it seems to have been the strategy behind this movie.
All right, let’s get into the nitty gritty. The movie opens with Richard Parker, like 15 years prior to the movie starting, trying to escape the clutches of Oscorp agents with super-secret information (we find out it’s just that he created the genetically modified spiders that bit Spider-Man. Whee?), as he fears it is too dangerous for human testing. We see him recording his thoughts for future-Peter onto an old PC running, I believe, Windows 98, which was a very nice touch. But then, in a large fight sequence on a private jet (that he somehow chartered—is he worth millions or something? He seemed well enough off but this honestly seemed a bit out of his price range. But anyway) he and an Oscorp assassin wrestle over a brand-new Sony VAIO laptop, the kind of Man of Steel-esque product placement that takes you right out of the movie as if someone slapped you in the face. Can’t these people stick to inserting it a little more discreetly? Like make every single computer at Oscorp a Sony or something? This anachronism aside, this scene is…okay. It’s incredibly predictable in its beats (Richard’s about to die! Oh, Mary got out of the bathroom just in time! All is well—oh no, the assassin’s not actually completely dead!), but I have to admire the writers for doing something which I figured they would ignore, which is that every time the assassin gets a hold of the laptop and closes it, Richard has to get it back, reopen it, and re-start the upload of his super-secret information to his super-secret bunker. The writers of the movie took into account the automatic sleep mode that comes on when you close laptops! Amazing!
This is one of the few times we’ll be “amazed” by this film.
Suffice it to say, everyone dies in the plane crash. Hopefully.
Cut to present day. Now, this is my favorite scene in the entire movie and actually made me lose a lot of my fears about what was going to happen later (that my fears were fully realized within the next twenty minutes made it doubly distressing, but at least for a few minutes I was enjoying myself). This is what is termed by Tvtropes as “The Teaser”—I would call it a cold open, but it’s not really a cold open this time at all. But it serves the same purpose as the opening of an Indiana Jones or James Bond movie—a seemingly unrelated mini-adventure that introduces you to the character before their “real” adventure begins.
In this case, it’s Spider-Man chasing after a hijacked armored truck full of yellow Oscorp goo (if I paid more attention to the comics, I might know what this goo signifies. As far as the movie is concerned, it’s just a valuable MacGuffin that has been hijacked). The driver is Paul Giamatti cursing in broken English with an intense Russian accent. Parsing what he says to Spider-Man when Spider-Man lands on the hood of the truck is difficult, but it’s something like, “Stupid Spider! I kill you! You curse the day you were born!” or something to that effect.
This guy is freaking hysterical. I loved it. The entire scene feels like a throwback to more enjoyable times. Spider-Man drops a bunch of corny quips, which far outweigh everything “funny” he said in the entirety of ASM 1. The action is frenetic as Spidey has to keep all the vials of goo from breaking, causing him to jump and shoot webs all over the place, ride on various police vehicles (the scene starts with the revelation that apparently every police car in the city is following this armored truck). The scene culminates in him taking down Paul Giamatti in hilarious, humiliating fashion, all to the tune of Giamatti cursing him out. “SPIDER! THIS IS NOT OVERRRRR!”
During the scene Spidey saves Max Dillon (Jamie Foxx), a doormat of a man who then develops an intense obsessive man-crush on Spider-Man. This is quite sad but pretty amusing. Unfortunately, for a character fulfilling a basic archetype, he doesn’t follow it very well. Unlike your typical doormat, when the boss forces him to stay after work on his birthday, he complains intensely and out loud to said boss. In fact he complains to pretty much anybody who will listen that HE designed the electrical grid and Oscorp basically screwed him over by never promoting him. Usually the doormat character mutters stuff like that and avoids actual confrontations. Now, the implication is he designed the electrical grid for most of New York City, which seemed quite bizarre to me. I’m assuming most of said grid existed before Max Dillon would have been an adult, though maybe he helped design the various modifications and upgrades to it that have been made since then. The other option is that he designed the electrical grid for the Oscorp building, which makes a lot more sense, since he is called upon by his boss to repair part of it. So after complaining loudly to his boss who doesn’t give a crap, he proceeds to stay after work and repair it. Maybe instead of being a doormat he just has some strange compulsion to obey authority? It’s difficult to tell. It seems clear that if he stood up to his boss and fixed it the next day he wouldn’t be fired, as the boss appears to barely give a crap about anything and certainly never makes any threats to Foxx to fire him, but perhaps he can’t see that.
Now, the following scene starts out hilarious, then gets kind of stupid. Really quickly. Foxx walks into a room filled with arcing electricity, and finds the broken electrical coupling. Now keep in mind he is literally surrounded by walls of blue-white lightning bolts flying everywhere. He calls a security guard or custodian or something to go turn off the breaker for the sector, but the guard says, “Forget it, I’m out of here”. Now obviously in real life Foxx’s character would leave and turn off the breaker himself and come back, or finally use this as an excuse to go home. But. This is a movie.
Foxx gets a step stool and reaches up to the two halves of the broken coupling, while singing “Happy Birthday” to himself. Now, I can’t remember if he says something to this effect, so I think it is actually just Jamie Foxx’s clear mastery of acting that gives it away: Max Dillon knows exactly what is going to happen when he puts the coupling back together. You can see it on his face, he gives a resigned sigh, something. It’s really funny. He just completely accepts that after a lifetime of debasement he’s going to be killed putting together this coupling. So he puts the coupling together…and nothing happens. For three seconds. THEN he is electrocuted.
This is ABSOLUTELY HYSTERICAL. I almost don’t regret the remaining 2 hours of the movie which ruin all the good will it builds up here at the beginning. Foxx somehow falls through the floor (maybe it explodes), down into a tank of genetically engineered electric eels which begin shocking and biting him. Everything explodes. It’s stupid but it’s so funny. Anyway, this leads to him turning into Electro, who is a bright-blue villain imbued with electrical powers. In fact, he seems to be made of electricity, and much like Dr. Manhattan can “teleport”. In this case he jumps into electrical outlets and zips around using the power grid. I don’t think the original Electro had this power, though I haven’t read Ultimate Spider-Man to see if this is an alteration. Obviously the bright-blue skin is from the Ultimate iteration of the character.
Ugh. Now we get all the bad parts of the movie, which is the other two hours. So there are two…no, three (sigh) other major plot threads in this movie besides the entire Electro vs. Spider-Man plotline. That’s four major plot threads if you’re keeping count, by the way. Did I mention this movie is a butt-numbing 142 minutes long? And, oh yes, it starts to drag.
The second plot thread is Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy. At the end of the last movie, Spidey gave a promise not to kill Gwen with his mere presence to her dying father. Cue haunting illusions of Dennis Leary looking sad wherever Peter looks. So Peter finds he can’t commit to a relationship with her, seemingly months after starting a relationship with her. So he dumps her. Gwen then says, “I am dumping you. I am dumping you!” A review by Walter Chaw at FilmFreakCentral claimed this was Gwen “[reclaiming] her victimization as power.” What? It’s sad and pitiful, is what it is. It’s like George in Seinfeld, “’It’s not me, it’s you’? What? Hey, I invented ‘it’s not me, it’s you’!” when a woman breaks up with him. He’s annoyed that she broke up with him before he could break up with her. This is all we really get out of Gwen doing the same thing. She’s pissed at emo-Peter and his endless introspection and dead-father-sightings, but by the end of the film he’s COMPLETELY JUSTIFIED in trying to dump her, as she recklessly insists on helping Spidey defeat Electro. “You don’t get to make that choice! I’m staying! It’s my choice!” says Gwen, as transformers explode around her and lightning bolts almost fry her instantaneously. WHAT? Look, this trope can be pulled off in certain situations, but when you are clearly an underpowered mortal sack of meat who can be killed with a flick of Electro’s finger, maybe you should listen to the Patriarchy and beat feet. Come back with some superpowers and we can talk. And honestly, your excuse is you “know the electrical grid”? ALL YOU DO IS FLICK A SWITCH AT THE RIGHT TIME. THAT’S IT. Sheesh.
My annoyance at this plot thread is it’s like, half the movie. Half the movie is dedicated to an on-again, off-again romance between emo-Peter and Gwen Stacy, as she waffles over moving to England to go to Oxford university. If I were her the scene at the Chinese restaurant would have been the last time I ever bothered speaking to old Petey, but apparently his penchant for sad instrospection and his wimpy, stuttering demeanor is just perversely appealing to her.
Can we just go over how terrible Andrew Garfield’s rendition of Peter Parker is, again? His Spider-Man is much approved over the first movie, but man. His rendition of Peter Parker is still terrible, terrible, terrible. STUTTERING IS NOT ACTING. REPEATING YOURSELF IS NOT ACTING. It’s inane. When people pause in their speech real life, they say, “um” or are silent during the gaps. They don’t repeat the last few words again. It’s just sloppy and seems to be predicated on a PERCEPTION of acting instead of actual acting.
The screenplay doesn’t help. At one point we are treated to Peter listening to a sad song on his iPod while laying on his bed. If only they could have been more tongue-in-cheek and had him weeping while doing this, like ‘ole Tobey Maguire would have done. Anyway, this depression leads him to try and return to figuring out what happened to his parents, a scene which eventually pays off later when in ANOTHER hissy fit he’s tearing down a bunch of maps and timelines he created and decides to throw the scientific calculator from his dad’s bag against the wall, revealing that inside of it were dozens of subway tokens. This makes Peter realize his father’s secret base is in an old abandoned subway station! For some reason. How that connection is made and why his father had a bunch of subway tokens hidden inside a scientific calculator are mysteries we may never solve.[/spoiler]
This entire review is basically one big SPOILER so either you don't care (and you shouldn't), or you've already seen it. Suffice it to say, the movie sucks, so you shouldn't care if you are spoiled. But, I go over like, 75% of the movie here and all the twists so...here is your warning.
PART 1
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
[spoiler]Let me start by saying this movie could have been worse. There are some good ideas here (given mostly very poor execution, but we’ll get into that), and, I actually enjoyed a few of the scenes, something I couldn’t really say about Amazing Spider-Man 1 at all. I was also annoyed out of my mind at several, and indeed, most of the movie.
Since these movies were originally created as an answer to the criticisms of Raimi’s Spider-Man 3 (it’s poor critical reviews and the passage of time prompting a reboot, lest Sony lose the rights to Spider-Man), it came as quite a surprise that this film made the same exact error. It had too many villains, and one felt incredibly tacked on. I am of course talking about…SPOILERS…the Green Goblin. NOT Harry Osborne—Harry Osborne was given quite a bit of development, and even though I found his backstory questionable at best (retroviral hyperplasia that is also genetic? Do the writers know what a retrovirus is? I dunno, maybe it’s a genetic susceptibility to a retrovirus regular people don’t have), and kind of dumb at worst (Peter and him used to be best friends before Harry got shipped off to boarding school for ten years, something not even mentioned once in the first movie, despite numerous chances to, as the entire plot revolved around Oscorp in that film as well), I at least have to admit we spent lots of time with Harry Osborne in this movie. But the Green Goblin himself, Harry’s alter ego, appears at the last minute, does his nefarious deed we all know is coming, and then…the movie kind of ends. Well, there is an extended, overly dramatic epilogue, but we’ll get to that.
The Venomification (?) of Green Goblin is exactly the sort of mistake you would think would be avoided in these scripts, but perhaps they can’t help themselves. After all, they have a sequel to set up here, and a spin-off universe to begin spinning-off (the Green Goblin and Rhino will return in The Sinister Six, presumably). But seriously: to repeat the biggest sin of Spider-Man 3 (far more erroneous than beatnik Peter, who is the greatest artistic invention of mankind) speaks to a sort of intense blindness in the creation of these things. Just toss everything together in a very loose chronological order and film it seems to have been the strategy behind this movie.
All right, let’s get into the nitty gritty. The movie opens with Richard Parker, like 15 years prior to the movie starting, trying to escape the clutches of Oscorp agents with super-secret information (we find out it’s just that he created the genetically modified spiders that bit Spider-Man. Whee?), as he fears it is too dangerous for human testing. We see him recording his thoughts for future-Peter onto an old PC running, I believe, Windows 98, which was a very nice touch. But then, in a large fight sequence on a private jet (that he somehow chartered—is he worth millions or something? He seemed well enough off but this honestly seemed a bit out of his price range. But anyway) he and an Oscorp assassin wrestle over a brand-new Sony VAIO laptop, the kind of Man of Steel-esque product placement that takes you right out of the movie as if someone slapped you in the face. Can’t these people stick to inserting it a little more discreetly? Like make every single computer at Oscorp a Sony or something? This anachronism aside, this scene is…okay. It’s incredibly predictable in its beats (Richard’s about to die! Oh, Mary got out of the bathroom just in time! All is well—oh no, the assassin’s not actually completely dead!), but I have to admire the writers for doing something which I figured they would ignore, which is that every time the assassin gets a hold of the laptop and closes it, Richard has to get it back, reopen it, and re-start the upload of his super-secret information to his super-secret bunker. The writers of the movie took into account the automatic sleep mode that comes on when you close laptops! Amazing!
This is one of the few times we’ll be “amazed” by this film.
Suffice it to say, everyone dies in the plane crash. Hopefully.
Cut to present day. Now, this is my favorite scene in the entire movie and actually made me lose a lot of my fears about what was going to happen later (that my fears were fully realized within the next twenty minutes made it doubly distressing, but at least for a few minutes I was enjoying myself). This is what is termed by Tvtropes as “The Teaser”—I would call it a cold open, but it’s not really a cold open this time at all. But it serves the same purpose as the opening of an Indiana Jones or James Bond movie—a seemingly unrelated mini-adventure that introduces you to the character before their “real” adventure begins.
In this case, it’s Spider-Man chasing after a hijacked armored truck full of yellow Oscorp goo (if I paid more attention to the comics, I might know what this goo signifies. As far as the movie is concerned, it’s just a valuable MacGuffin that has been hijacked). The driver is Paul Giamatti cursing in broken English with an intense Russian accent. Parsing what he says to Spider-Man when Spider-Man lands on the hood of the truck is difficult, but it’s something like, “Stupid Spider! I kill you! You curse the day you were born!” or something to that effect.
This guy is freaking hysterical. I loved it. The entire scene feels like a throwback to more enjoyable times. Spider-Man drops a bunch of corny quips, which far outweigh everything “funny” he said in the entirety of ASM 1. The action is frenetic as Spidey has to keep all the vials of goo from breaking, causing him to jump and shoot webs all over the place, ride on various police vehicles (the scene starts with the revelation that apparently every police car in the city is following this armored truck). The scene culminates in him taking down Paul Giamatti in hilarious, humiliating fashion, all to the tune of Giamatti cursing him out. “SPIDER! THIS IS NOT OVERRRRR!”
During the scene Spidey saves Max Dillon (Jamie Foxx), a doormat of a man who then develops an intense obsessive man-crush on Spider-Man. This is quite sad but pretty amusing. Unfortunately, for a character fulfilling a basic archetype, he doesn’t follow it very well. Unlike your typical doormat, when the boss forces him to stay after work on his birthday, he complains intensely and out loud to said boss. In fact he complains to pretty much anybody who will listen that HE designed the electrical grid and Oscorp basically screwed him over by never promoting him. Usually the doormat character mutters stuff like that and avoids actual confrontations. Now, the implication is he designed the electrical grid for most of New York City, which seemed quite bizarre to me. I’m assuming most of said grid existed before Max Dillon would have been an adult, though maybe he helped design the various modifications and upgrades to it that have been made since then. The other option is that he designed the electrical grid for the Oscorp building, which makes a lot more sense, since he is called upon by his boss to repair part of it. So after complaining loudly to his boss who doesn’t give a crap, he proceeds to stay after work and repair it. Maybe instead of being a doormat he just has some strange compulsion to obey authority? It’s difficult to tell. It seems clear that if he stood up to his boss and fixed it the next day he wouldn’t be fired, as the boss appears to barely give a crap about anything and certainly never makes any threats to Foxx to fire him, but perhaps he can’t see that.
Now, the following scene starts out hilarious, then gets kind of stupid. Really quickly. Foxx walks into a room filled with arcing electricity, and finds the broken electrical coupling. Now keep in mind he is literally surrounded by walls of blue-white lightning bolts flying everywhere. He calls a security guard or custodian or something to go turn off the breaker for the sector, but the guard says, “Forget it, I’m out of here”. Now obviously in real life Foxx’s character would leave and turn off the breaker himself and come back, or finally use this as an excuse to go home. But. This is a movie.
Foxx gets a step stool and reaches up to the two halves of the broken coupling, while singing “Happy Birthday” to himself. Now, I can’t remember if he says something to this effect, so I think it is actually just Jamie Foxx’s clear mastery of acting that gives it away: Max Dillon knows exactly what is going to happen when he puts the coupling back together. You can see it on his face, he gives a resigned sigh, something. It’s really funny. He just completely accepts that after a lifetime of debasement he’s going to be killed putting together this coupling. So he puts the coupling together…and nothing happens. For three seconds. THEN he is electrocuted.
This is ABSOLUTELY HYSTERICAL. I almost don’t regret the remaining 2 hours of the movie which ruin all the good will it builds up here at the beginning. Foxx somehow falls through the floor (maybe it explodes), down into a tank of genetically engineered electric eels which begin shocking and biting him. Everything explodes. It’s stupid but it’s so funny. Anyway, this leads to him turning into Electro, who is a bright-blue villain imbued with electrical powers. In fact, he seems to be made of electricity, and much like Dr. Manhattan can “teleport”. In this case he jumps into electrical outlets and zips around using the power grid. I don’t think the original Electro had this power, though I haven’t read Ultimate Spider-Man to see if this is an alteration. Obviously the bright-blue skin is from the Ultimate iteration of the character.
Ugh. Now we get all the bad parts of the movie, which is the other two hours. So there are two…no, three (sigh) other major plot threads in this movie besides the entire Electro vs. Spider-Man plotline. That’s four major plot threads if you’re keeping count, by the way. Did I mention this movie is a butt-numbing 142 minutes long? And, oh yes, it starts to drag.
The second plot thread is Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy. At the end of the last movie, Spidey gave a promise not to kill Gwen with his mere presence to her dying father. Cue haunting illusions of Dennis Leary looking sad wherever Peter looks. So Peter finds he can’t commit to a relationship with her, seemingly months after starting a relationship with her. So he dumps her. Gwen then says, “I am dumping you. I am dumping you!” A review by Walter Chaw at FilmFreakCentral claimed this was Gwen “[reclaiming] her victimization as power.” What? It’s sad and pitiful, is what it is. It’s like George in Seinfeld, “’It’s not me, it’s you’? What? Hey, I invented ‘it’s not me, it’s you’!” when a woman breaks up with him. He’s annoyed that she broke up with him before he could break up with her. This is all we really get out of Gwen doing the same thing. She’s pissed at emo-Peter and his endless introspection and dead-father-sightings, but by the end of the film he’s COMPLETELY JUSTIFIED in trying to dump her, as she recklessly insists on helping Spidey defeat Electro. “You don’t get to make that choice! I’m staying! It’s my choice!” says Gwen, as transformers explode around her and lightning bolts almost fry her instantaneously. WHAT? Look, this trope can be pulled off in certain situations, but when you are clearly an underpowered mortal sack of meat who can be killed with a flick of Electro’s finger, maybe you should listen to the Patriarchy and beat feet. Come back with some superpowers and we can talk. And honestly, your excuse is you “know the electrical grid”? ALL YOU DO IS FLICK A SWITCH AT THE RIGHT TIME. THAT’S IT. Sheesh.
My annoyance at this plot thread is it’s like, half the movie. Half the movie is dedicated to an on-again, off-again romance between emo-Peter and Gwen Stacy, as she waffles over moving to England to go to Oxford university. If I were her the scene at the Chinese restaurant would have been the last time I ever bothered speaking to old Petey, but apparently his penchant for sad instrospection and his wimpy, stuttering demeanor is just perversely appealing to her.
Can we just go over how terrible Andrew Garfield’s rendition of Peter Parker is, again? His Spider-Man is much approved over the first movie, but man. His rendition of Peter Parker is still terrible, terrible, terrible. STUTTERING IS NOT ACTING. REPEATING YOURSELF IS NOT ACTING. It’s inane. When people pause in their speech real life, they say, “um” or are silent during the gaps. They don’t repeat the last few words again. It’s just sloppy and seems to be predicated on a PERCEPTION of acting instead of actual acting.
The screenplay doesn’t help. At one point we are treated to Peter listening to a sad song on his iPod while laying on his bed. If only they could have been more tongue-in-cheek and had him weeping while doing this, like ‘ole Tobey Maguire would have done. Anyway, this depression leads him to try and return to figuring out what happened to his parents, a scene which eventually pays off later when in ANOTHER hissy fit he’s tearing down a bunch of maps and timelines he created and decides to throw the scientific calculator from his dad’s bag against the wall, revealing that inside of it were dozens of subway tokens. This makes Peter realize his father’s secret base is in an old abandoned subway station! For some reason. How that connection is made and why his father had a bunch of subway tokens hidden inside a scientific calculator are mysteries we may never solve.[/spoiler]
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