Take Two Tuesday: The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) ...or, how I learned to stop worrying and love comic book movies that aren't Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Well, this is a first.  “Take Two Tuesdays” is a series that I hope I won’t have to use too much, because the goal of a “Take Two” review is to reevaluate a film I’ve already reviewed here – put another way, backpedal on a review.  I’m usually pretty consistent in terms of my opinions on movies, but every once in a while I’ve been egregiously wrong.  A few examples that come to mind are The Shining and Anchorman, both of which I appreciated much more the second time around; on the flip side, my recent excursion through the Star Wars prequel trilogy proved to be way less fun without my childhood lenses in place.  So in those rare moments when my current opinion contradicts a review I’ve already published, “Take Two Tuesdays” will be my chance to set the record straight.

In this installment, it’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2.  The headline here?  The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is better than I gave it credit.

In my earlier review of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, I bemoaned the overfull quality of the film, calling it “a more sprawling narrative that feels inflated by the demands of producers who want to lay groundwork for future films rather than let those films develop organically.”  The kindest word I had for the film was “serviceable,” but I lamented, “‘serviceable’ just isn’t good enough any more.”

I’ll be honest:  in the wake of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, my comic book movie radar needs some serious readjusting.  It’s probably my second favorite comic book movie of all time at this point (you know the first), but it’s making the others look bad.  I noticed this problem after seeing X-Men: Days of Future Past.  While I waited for the inevitable postcredits stinger, my first thought was, “Eh.”  Immediately, I checked my premises; aside from one or two very small bits, I hadn’t had an unkind thought during the film itself.  The only thought I could rally behind that lukewarm off-the-cuff reaction was, “It wasn’t Winter Soldier.”

And that’s no way to review a movie.  On its own merits, X-Men: Days of Future Past was a smash success for me, and that’s the review I wrote.  Reapproaching The Amazing Spider-Man 2 with a similar sensibility (and a clearer sense of how all the moving pieces fit together) yielded comparable results.  It is, perhaps, the sequel I was waiting for after The Amazing Spider-Man.

The positives I cited still stand – Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone have extraordinary chemistry together, Jamie Foxx’s Electro is a vastly original and highly entertaining nemesis.  And I have better things to say about Dane DeHaan’s Harry Osborn; I love that the film takes him down a different path than James Franco’s, and his character arc is much more compelling the second time around.

I remain, however, disgruntled about two pieces, though in revisiting the film they loom less large than I had perceived.  On the subject of DeHaan, I’m still miffed that the film doesn’t spend as much time developing his third-act twist, and I’m still sore about the “I’ll be back” cliffhanger.  I would have much rather spent more time with him than on my second grievance:  I still maintain that the subplot surrounding Peter’s parents is mishandled in the film.  These scenes don’t contribute anything to the narrative, don’t bear logically on the plot at hand, and ultimately don’t even resolve themselves.  Either the film needs to foreground this subplot – it is, after all, the opening scene of two films now – or drop it in favor of something more closely connected to the central story.  If it doesn’t pay off in The Inevitable Amazing Spider-Man 3, I think we all know when to get our popcorn refill.

In hindsight/retrospect (not sure which one), these are much smaller issues than I had initially felt.  I had a blast with The Amazing Spider-Man 2, especially the first hour (I know, because I got my refill at the moment when Peter digs out his father’s briefcase).  But the rest of it didn’t disappoint; I found myself laughing, caught up in the entertaining parts of the film and asking myself, “When exactly did I space out the last time?”  I couldn’t find that moment.

I feel the same way now about The Amazing Spider-Man 2 as I do about X-Men: Days of Future Past.  It doesn’t revolutionize the genre, and it isn’t The Winter Soldier.  But it doesn’t have to be.  I had forgotten that a film needs only to entertain and, time permitting, say something important.  The Amazing Spider-Man 2 more than succeeds at the former.  And the bits about hope at the very end tickle the Dark Knight Rises enthusiast in me just fine.

In short, I’ve upgraded this one to “buy on DVD.”  (That’s high praise coming from someone who still doesn’t own The Amazing Spider-Man.)

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)

If I ever get accused of making up my mind about a movie before I see it, I’ll point to The Amazing Spider-Man 2.  I desperately wanted to love this film, even after and in spite of the disappointment I faced with the first film in the reboot franchise.  The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is not a catastrophe by any stretch of the imagination; there are things it does quite well, things that might have made the film an unqualified success, but the parts that don’t work did impede my enjoyment enough.

Fraught over his promise to her father, Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) doesn’t know where his relationship with Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) is going, nor does he know what to make of his former best friend Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan) returning to New York to inherit his father’s company.  What’s more, Peter is still wrestling with the mysterious disappearance of his parents all those years ago.  As Spider-Man, though, he knows that the arrival of the demigodly Electro (Jamie Foxx) spells bad news for the city.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2’s greatest undoing is its obvious ambition; like an overeager patron of a fifty-year buffet, director Marc Webb and a quartet of screenwriters load up their plate with no fewer than seven running subplots, borrowing from wide stretches of Spidey’s comic book mythology.  And like at any buffet, there are entrees that taste great and other dishes that add only empty filler to the meal.

Let’s start with the bad news.  A lot of my complaints about the first film still stand, particularly about the subplot regarding Peter’s parents.  In a film that has so much going on, a subplot that has no direct link to the main plot should have been excised or made more relevant; it does serve to tie up a loose end from the first film, but it’s a conversation-closer rather than a motivator for the characters.  Furthermore, it’s the focus of much of the film’s middle, which means that the plot of the film screeches to a halt while Peter looks at computers until he finds the right file.

The Parkers subplot is the only thing that Amazing Spider-Man 2 has too much of, and it certainly interferes with the pacing of the film because nearly everything else feels underrepresented and rushed.  While DeHaan is quite good as a Harry Osborn vastly different from James Franco’s interpretation, the script pushes him through one too many character transformations and then bails on him with the knowledge that he’ll be back for another film.  Similarly, Foxx is – pardon the pun – electrifying as Electro, an iconoclast whose hero worship collapses when Spider-Man forgets his name, but the film shuffles him offstage so that the aforementioned computer scenes can take precedence.

It bears comparison to Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, which juggled a healthy amount of subplots and struck a commendable balance between Peter Parker’s angst and his superheroic struggle against Doctor Octopus (played brilliantly by Alfred Molina).  Raimi knew where to draw the line between plots and came out with a fantastically tight narrative; Webb’s is a more sprawling narrative that feels inflated by the demands of producers who want to lay groundwork for future films rather than let those films develop organically.

I don’t, however, object to the brief treatment of Paul Giamatti as The Rhino.  His scenes are fun bookends that get us in and out of the film rather deftly, and they’re cleverly scripted to tell us exactly what we need to know about Spider-Man at those moments.  He might be back for future sequels, but if not this is a perfectly fine way for movies to acknowledge the wider comics mythology without getting bogged down.  (See also Batroc in Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Scarecrow in The Dark Knight.)

One thing that Amazing Spider-Man 2 does especially well, though, is the relationship between Peter and Gwen.  Perhaps because of the real-life relationship between Garfield and Stone, these scenes are the most genuine and the most compelling in the entire film.  Garfield is pitch-perfect as the tormented teen, truly conflicted about the tension between his feelings and his dangerous lifestyle; he downright masters the chatty Web-Slinger persona, too, giving Spidey a New York edge to his wit that Tobey Maguire seemed to lack.  And Stone – well, you’ve probably read my blog long enough to know that I think she can do no wrong, and she continues to ace it here; we can feel her frustrations with Peter but also know from whence those feelings arise.

And I’ve spoken well of Foxx’s performance as Electro, and the scenes with him are honestly among the best in the film.  Webb, previously best known for his eloquently beautiful (500) Days of Summer, proves himself a solidly capable action director to boot.  I’m not sure quite what to make of Hans Zimmer’s dubstep-inflected score, but the action sequences in which the bass line drops and Electro pummels Spidey are probably the best such scenes in any Spider-Man film, realistic without a fanboy-tongue-in-cheek wink (as the Raimi films always seemed to do).  Or maybe it’s just that they’re set at night? 

Either way, in these moments Webb gives us the Spider-Man film we want.  And if the film had been a little more focused on these pieces instead of pushing toward too many finish lines, it might have even exceeded Spider-Man 2 in the realm of comic book films.  But your mileage, true believers, may vary.  Perhaps this is the future of the Spider-Man franchise, and I’m wrong about its misdirection.  Maybe I’m stubbornly clinging to a previous generation’s Spider-films, but I sense from the critical reception that the problem isn’t with me.  

I'm willing to be wrong - I want desperately to be wrong about this film, but the problem is that this Spider-Man just isn’t amazing enough.  It’s serviceable, but in a world where Captain America: The Winter Soldier is playing a few screens away, “serviceable” just isn’t good enough any more.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is rated PG-13 for “sequences of sci-fi action/violence.”  We have a lot of zapping, kicking, and punching, with a little bit of burning and exploding; one character death might be traumatic and certainly ups the angst quota for the film.

Come back on Wednesday for the Double-Oh-Seventh of the month as Timothy Dalton makes his curtain call as James Bond in Licence to Kill!

Monday at the Movies - November 5, 2012

Welcome to Week Forty of “Monday at the Movies.”  It’s the Fifth of November, true, but seeing as how I’ve already reviewed V for Vendetta on this blog, it’s time for something completely different.

Chronicle (2012) – With Chronicle, director Josh Trank does something that I had to see to believe:  he combines my favorite film genre – superhero science-fiction – with my least favorite film style – found footage.  The result is somewhat surprising, but entirely worth the 80 minutes it’ll take to watch.  Andrew (Dane DeHaan) and his cousin Matt (Alex Russell) discover a mysterious object in the woods and, with their class president friend Steve (Michael B. Jordan), gain the ability to manipulate objects with their minds.  What happens next?  Well, you know that line about absolute power.  Chronicle is one of the latest in the real-life-superheroes genre, following on the heels of films like Watchmen, Kick-Ass, and, to a lesser extent, The Incredibles.  Chronicle manages to do something slightly different, though, developing the characters even before they gain their powers; it’s a model that more superhero stories, I think, should follow, since we’re already invested – particularly in Andrew – by the time the plot asks us to be.  Aside from the smart character development courtesy of Max Landis’s screenplay, the film features some really deft special effects; since the whole movie is purportedly being filmed by Andrew’s camera, there’s a need for the effects to be particularly convincing to maintain the illusion.  (It helps that Andrew eventually uses his powers to work the camera in a more conventional manner.)  Fortunately, the film succeeds in rendering the trio’s powers effectively.  While the film’s racial and sexual politics are a bit wonky, the story Chronicle ends up telling is compelling and engaging, galloping toward an inevitable but heart-wrenching conclusion.  Its concision is one of its greatest strengths, but what matters more is that Chronicle is a sound story told well.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!