Bad guys win

In my review of director Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man, I suggested that Webb was not a good choice to helm a big-budget blockbuster. In this, my review of the follow-up, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, I am repeating that statement.

Webb mucks it up big time with this second go-round featuring Andrew Garfield in spandex and cracking wise. While Webb proves himself adept at drama and romance (Garfield and Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy are kind of adorable), he botches the action elements and tries to juggle too many villains—among them, the goofy Electro (Jamie Foxx), the Green Goblin (Dane Dehaan) and the robotic Rhino (Paul Giamatti). Electro gets the majority of the villain screen time, an unfortunate circumstance given that his baddie is the most uninteresting of the three.

Electro starts off as Max Dillon, a geeky electrical engineer at Oscorp Industries who gets transformed into some sort of bluish, see-through monstrosity after electrocuting himself and falling into a tank of electric eels. He has the ability to move and stop things with electricity, which makes no sense, and disappear into wires and sockets, which also makes no sense. Yes, this is a comic book movie where impossible things are routine, but this stuff is just stupid.

Given the sheer magnitude of characters vying for time in this mess, Electro winds up underdeveloped and uninteresting. Foxx wants to create something as memorable as Jack Nicholson’s Joker in the 1989 Batman but he winds up more like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Mr. Freeze in 1997’s Batman & Robin.

DeHaan, an actor I can safely say I can’t stand at this point, makes one really, really miss James Franco as Harry Osborn. DeHaan always speaks as if he digs his own voice, even if it sounds like he has a sinus infection.

His generally annoying presence isn’t the total blame for this film’s mishandling of the Green Goblin. The blame mostly lies with Webb and his makeup folks, who come up with something tragically bad for Goblin’s looks. He basically has oily hair and a horrific skin problem.

Here’s something else that annoyed me. Harry, who has inherited the secretive and sinister Oscorp Industries from his father, Norman (Chris Cooper), is dying because he is slowly becoming a lizard, or at least I think that’s what was happening to him. He goes into some secret chamber at Oscorp to discover a possible cure for himself with spider venom. He has a major reaction to the injection, and saves himself by crawling into the Goblin suit, which he is seeing for the very first time. Harry then takes to the skies, expertly, to battle Spider-Man, without reading a training manual or doing some practice flights. Again, I know I’m supposed to accept the outlandish with these movies, but come on!

Garfield and Stone annoyed me in the first movie, but I liked them this time out. Had the movie focused more on their relationship, and perhaps jettisoned a villain or two, this might’ve been something.

There’s a big, dramatic occurrence deep in this film, and that sequence is the best thing in the movie, and the film most certainly should’ve ended directly after it. Instead, Webb and his writers force a terrible finale that feels tacked on, and destroys any dramatic tension.

And Webb will be back as director for the next installment, so all seems to be lost when it comes to Spider-Man films for the foreseeable future.