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seriousficAWWWWWWW SHIT, it’s late at night, so I can say whatever shit I want about Amazing Spider-Man 2: We’re So Uncreative We Can’t Think Up A Subtitle, and nobody will know except for Australia. And what are you guys gonna do? You already sent Mel Gibson at America. If that’s the best you can do---
THE GOOD
-I liked the end credits song. I think it was by Pharrell Williams? I don’t listen to a lot of music, so I think the only songs I’ve heard of his are Blurred Lines and Happy, and both of those, the beat was kinda just too… radio jingle? It was like pure sugar, ya know, couldn’t get into it. But this song was really good. I’m probably gonna, uh… completely legally buy an MP3 of it. Thanks iPod!
-Okay, I used Google—because I’m not Spider-Man—and it turns out that song was by Kendrick Lamar and Alicia Keys. I hope you appreciate my attention to detail and the care I put into this work.
-The action sequences were pretty good. There were, like, three in a two hour and thirty minute movie and they were pretty short, too, but… anyway, they still don’t have a patch on Raimi. His action scenes told stories—Spider-Man has to save a bus full of kids, stop this train, save Mary Jane, save Aunt May, whatever. So there are goals, objectives, little victories and defeats. This is pretty much just Spider-Man and whoever he’s fighting dancing around until the budgets runs out, and it feels like there was not much of a budget. (We’re supposed to be worried about Green Goblin in Part 3 when Spider-Man beats him in, like, three minutes here?) But aside from the size of the portions, the meal was okay.
-There’s a good scene where Peter Parker is proactive and uses SCIENCE! to prepare for a rematch with Electro, even though Electro is apparently captured at the time. This moment of genre savvy from Parker ends up totally pointless, though.
-Stone and Garfield still have good chemistry, and there’s a rather nice scene where he uses physical comedy to help her get away from some goons. It makes you wish this was just a movie about two dating teenagers who happen to be tangled up with corporate espionage—which is probably a bad thing in a Spider-Man movie.
-I like the look of Electro, even if it is ridiculously derivative of Dr. Manhattan (although he has a set of leather Speedos that can apparently travel through power lines and such). But compared to how the Green Goblin or the Rhino look—fuck.
-There’s a bit where Spider-Man catches a cold that’s right out of the comics, even if they make a hacky joke of him sneezing in his mask. Thanks, movie.
-On my way home from the theater, a light was about to change red, so I sped up to make it and I passed by a cop. I was only doing, like, 47 in a 45 zone, so he didn’t pull me over.
THE BAD
-I saw a trailer for the remake of Annie before the movie. Thank God we finally have an Annie movie where Cameron Diaz gets mistaken for a hooker.
-There’s this long prologue where Peter’s father, Richard Parker, gets a flashback and apparently the filmmakers forgot he’s not a spy in this continuity, because he manages to beat up an assassin in hand-to-hand combat. That assassin is actually obscure Spider-Man villain The Total Cliché, whose superpower is talking to his targets for no reason instead of just shooting them, so they have a chance to beat him up.
-This entire scene is like the cannibal sequence in that Pirates of the Caribbean movie, where it’s basically only there so they can have some pointless action in a supposed adventure movie where all anyone ever does is sit around and talk about their feeeeeelings.
-Oh, and later in the movie they try to sell us that Richard Parker is a traitor who turned on sweet, innocent Norman Osborn, but we’ve already been shown that he was a goody and that Norman’s an asshole, so that attempted plot twist is a complete waste of time aside from being a little more of the movie with no Shailene Woodley in it.
-Gwen Stacy gives a valedictorian speech about how she’s going to die later on in the movie, but Peter shouldn’t give up hope and should bravely soldier on after only five months of apparently doing nothing but moping at Gwen’s grave. That seemed odd. You’d think she would talk about education or something.
-(I really want one of the villains in the sequel to be someone who lost a loved one during Peter’s five months of man-pain. That would be hilarious.)
-This is basically the same movie as Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, only done by complete maroons instead of cool dudes. I’ll give you an example. In Raimi’s movie, the theme is that even though Peter has good intentions in trying to protect Mary Jane by breaking up with her, he doesn’t have the right to make that choice for her. In ASM2, the theme is that Peter-slash-Gwen’s-dad absolutely have the right to make that choice for her, and by not doing so she’s condemned to a horrible death. So, uh, slightly different message there.
-The classic sixties Spider-Man theme gets way too much of a work-out there. It was cute when they worked it into the Raimi movies, but here it is EVERYWHERE. Peter’s ring-tone is the Spider-Man theme, he hums it to himself. It’s like someone focus grouped the old Spider-Man 2 and said “THEY LOVE THE CARTOON THEME SONG! GET MORE CARTOON THEME SONG IN THERE!”
-By rights, shouldn’t they be referencing the theme song to the 90s cartoon on Fox Kids? SPIDER-MAN, SPIDER-MAN, RADIOACTIVE, WHOA!
-Or hell, the Spectacular Spider-Man theme. That was great. SPEC-TACULAR SPEC-TACULAR!
-Opening scene openly rips off The Incredibles. Just replace “has to get to the wedding on time” with “has to get to graduation ceremony on time.” By the way, didn’t we reboot Spider-Man so we could get all that great storytelling with Flash Thompson and co. in high school? What happened to THAT?
-Also, can we give up the ghost on the notion that this Peter Parker is some kind of nerd or science geek? He needs to learn about batteries from Youtube, he needs Gwen Stacy to think up everything scientific he does, at his graduation ceremony he shows up late, kisses the hottest girl in school, and high-fives the dean… I would sooner believe that Andrew Garfield is playing Koogler than Peter Parker.
-The Stan Lee cameo is WEAK. The Marvel Studios movies, they come up with clever ways to get him in there—here he’s just sitting in a crowd. They couldn’t even have him handing out diplomas?
-No, no, guys, the point of Spider-Man’s quips is that he says clever, funny things so we like him. The problem with this movie is that it’s written by stupid, stupid people, so Peter says dumb, dumb things like “JUST DON’T CALL ME LATE FOR DINNER!” That’s not a quip. That’s barely even a thought. I don’t see how Saturday Night Live can come up with jokes every week, and these guys, they can’t get someone from Community to spend an hour reading the script and thinking of funny things for Peter to do or say? Captain America: The Winter Soldier, they got Abed to show up, so it’s clearly not IMPOSSIBLE.
-JUST DON’T CALL ME LATE FOR DINNER. That’s like someone saying “case of the Mondays.” If I heard someone say that shit in real life, I would have to punch them in the face. Even if it was like a little kid. It’s like doing the Nazi salute. Yeah, yeah, free speech, but there are some things modern society just shouldn’t have to tolerate.
-To continue the Spider-man 2 parallels: the filmmakers belatedly realize how monstrously unsympathetic Peter looked in the first ASM, continuing to see Gwen against her DEAD FATHER’S WISHES, so they pretty much immediately break up and entirely redo the UST storyline from Raimi’s movie. Just replace “John Jameson wants me to marry him” with “Oxford wants me to go to college in England.” Same exact story.
-We do the thing where the hero and his girlfriend can’t be together, so he stalks here from afar and it’s supposed to be romantic. Really? Still? Have these people never listened to any film criticism? That was the chief complaint about Superman Returns, and the big criticism of Spider-Man 3 was all the villains; this movie has three. It’s a reboot; can we at least get NEW MISTAKES?
-By the way, this Peter Parker would be UNBEARABLE in real life. He does shit like walking through a busy street all lovelorn at the sight of Gwen, delaying all the traffic for a million years, kissing Gwen even though she’s broken up with him, etc. I get the overwhelming impression that Andrew Garfield’s take on Spider-Man has sent quite a few dick pics. Just laying that out.
-That brings us to Jamie Foxx’s Electro. I remember thinking when news of the raceswap came out that it was really weird how we can’t make Peter Parker black, or any of the brilliant scientist villains black, but cheap thug Electro? Sure. Well, they give him a backstory where he’s supposedly a brilliant scientist—surprise—but he does not act like he has an intelligent bone in his body. In fact, I swear to God, I think this character is mentally retarded.
-(I can use that word, I have Aspergers. I am reclaiming it to refer to stupid people.)
-But Foxx’s Max Dillon isn’t the cool kind of mentally challenged, like me. *puffs cigar* This guy needs help tying his shoelaces. He thinks Spider-Man is his best friend because they met once on the street, he talks to himself as Spider-Man, he’s super-easily manipulated by Harry Osborn (in a complete rip-off of the Raimi movie’s “Harry uses Doc Ock to attack Spider-Man” plot), he enters Gwen’s floor for her in the elevator that is controlled by voice. This guy is like an episode of New Girl. A Winston episode.
-Dillon also has the clichéd ‘evil fanboy’ origin from The Incredibles and Batman Forever. It seems really like a step back that we’ve made the socially awkward, (supposedly) geeky, racially other guy into the evil villain who must be destroyed, whereas Peter Parker is now a yuppie who hangs out with hot chicks and trust-fund babies. Damn these fake geek boys!
-Most importantly, I never felt afraid of, sympathetic for, or even just interested in Foxx’s Dillon. He was simply annoying when he wasn’t blowing up buildings. The man’s an special effects reel, not a character.
-And Dillon gets his powers from being electrocuted and dropped into a tank of electric eels, which seems unlikely. Oh, did his parents genetically modify him too?
-It doesn’t help that Dillon has a whimsical theme song that makes March Of The Villains sound like The Imperial March.
-He says “It’s my birthday. Time to light my candles!” before blowing some shit up at one point. Again, movie, we have this problem where people are supposed to be saying clever, interesting things, but because you’ve left the writing in the care of people who are neither clever nor interesting, they only say things dumb-dumbs would find clever.
-Okay, there’s one good line about Jack the Ripper. You’re at notch one, movie.
-Peter makes a big Homeland collage of Oscorp files and pictures of his parents and stuff with, like, colored tape. And he puts a picture of Gwen Stacy on it with a little notecard under it and he’s written on the notecard ‘Do I have to lose you too?’ BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh my fuck, can you imagine this guy’s Instagram account? I get the feeling David Hyde Pierce would call him gay and punch him in the gut.
-Okay, after Electro is defeated for the first time—by WATER, so you’ve got a supervillain who could be taken out by Mel Gibson in Signs—he’s taken to that dumb Spider-Man Arkham rip-off from the comics and they get a cartoon ‘ve have vays of making you talk!’ Nazi to torture him? Like, literally, if you were high and you listened to this guy’s accent, you would think he was a cartoon character in a live-action movie like with Who Framed Roger Rabbit. And he tortures Electro—BY SHOCKING HIM. Which hurts him. And later, Harry Osborn shocks Electro with a taser and that lets Electro break free?
-????????
-Are you getting a picture of how fragmented this story is when I’m described all these plot elements and they have no connection to each other? Anyway, Peter’s old best friend who he’s never mentioned before, Harry Osborn comes back to town! They have a man-date for five minutes and are the bestest buddies ever until—
-Shit, I’m gonna need another dash for this. Okay, Norman Osborn is dying of MacGregor’s Syndrome. Here the movie got me, because after being played by Chris Cooper for forty seconds, Norman dies off-screen, so I assumed they would reveal he was faking his death, not that Chris Cooper was just hired to be in this movie for forty seconds. No, apparently, yeah, they just got Chris Cooper for forty seconds of daddy issues.
-But anyway, during those forty seconds, Chris Cooper reveals that Harry has THE SAME DISEASE! IT’S HEREDITARY! This comes as a big shock to Harry, although if my father were dying of a rare disease, you’d think I would at least go to the Wikipedia page and look up a few facts about it before I was in my fucking twenties.
-Now Norman Osborn has died at the terribly young age of fucking seventy, so as you can imagine, Harry is in a real rush to cure this disease that would kill him ten years before statistically he would go down anyway. Then again, this is the Spider-Man universe, where Aunt May can live to the ripe old age of 292 so long as her nephew doesn’t get married. Objection withdrawn.
--It turns out that Peter Parker has magic blood from being bitten by that spider—or that his father used their bloodline to create the spider and Peter has no other blood relatives—OR that Peter might know where Harry can get magic venom from the spider. And one of those three things will cure Harry. I think his blood? But for no reason, Peter refuses to give his DYING BEST FRIEND one drop of blood to save his life, so now after an entire five minutes of being the very best of friends, Peter and Harry ARE MORTAL ENEMIES! RAAAAAAAAGH!
-By the way, Peter breaks this to Harry in a way that seems designed to turn him into a supervillain. Harry thinks Peter knows Spider-Man because P takes pictures of him for the Bugle (no, we don’t get Jameson, Peter just sends the pictures in via e-mail—FUCK YOU, MOVIE). Peter doesn’t want to hook Harry up with dat radioactive blood, so he says he doesn’t know Spider-Man, but he’ll try. Now, since the answer is no, you’d think Peter would just say “I can’t find him anywhere!” and leave it at that. No, dressed as Spider-Man, he goes to Harry just to say “nope, no can do.” Harry takes the news of being condemned to a slow, agonizing death for no reason about as well as you’d think.
-Can I mention the separate stupidity of Peter thinking Harry is, what, just going to guzzle his blood down like Kool-Aid instead of testing it out first? Like the heads of massive biotech companies can do? And no, his stated reason for refusing isn’t that he’s afraid Oscorp will clone him or do something otherwise immoral, it’s just that he thinks Harry will shove the blood up his ass or whatever and turn into a giant monster. Reasonable concern for the Spider-Man universe, I suppose.
-Incredibly inconsequential plot machinations involving nobodies like Spencer Smythe, Donald Menken, and, uh, ‘Mr. Fiers’ ensue. Harry gets fired from owning Oscorp in, like, an afternoon, so he breaks into Ravencroft to free Electro so Electro can break him into Oscorp. I guess Harry is only Sam Fisher in buildings that begin with an R.
-Here follows a very racially uncomfortable scene where smooth-talking white boy Harry coaxes the childlike simpleton black man with incredible power into doing his bidding—I mean serious Of Mice And Men shit, here. For no reason, Electro goes along with all of Harry’s schemes until they part ways.
-Harry uses the magic spider blood and turns into a monster, which he blames on Peter for not giving him the magic human blood. So Harry straps himself into the conveniently on hand and fully operational Goblin Glider + battlesuit, which he learns how to expertly use in about forty-five minutes I think. I don’t think he’s super strong or anything, just hideously deformed, so he needs the power of his costume. But for some reason Spider-Man can’t knock him out with one punch to his absolutely unprotected face? I suppose this was an issue with Doctor Octopus too, but no one described that movie as Nolanesque, so fuck it.
-After the Times Square battle where Electro let off explosive electricity that brought down buildings, sent cars flying, and probably killed dozens, Gwen insists on going with Spider-Man to fight him in the middle of a dubstep generator (so that’s where it comes from!). Yeah, I’m thinking even if it weren’t for Harry Osborn, she would’ve gone down trying to help Peter lift a fire truck or something.
-Of course, since this is a movie, she has to do something helpful despite the monumental stupidity of her being there, so we get a reenactment of the ‘female lead needs to pull a switch to stop the bad guy’ climax from Iron Man. And, uh, Green Lantern. Yes, they crib a cribbed scene from Green Lantern. Complete with it almost killing the hero.
-You know that really embarrassing scene in Spider-Man 3 where Sandman and Venom just run into each other and decide to be Spidey-killing friends? This one-ups it. Spider-Man defeats Electro, then Green Goblin immediately shows up to take Gwen hostage. I really wanted them to keep going with the uber-awkward script structuring and have the Rhino show up just after Gwen died, but no luck.
-And of course Harry is still alive and plotting revenge without even being mildly inconvenienced, so this movie has no real ending. It doesn’t even have the balls to end on a downer note (just like the last movie) with Peter quitting Spider-Man, since we know there’s going to be an ASM3 and they could do something interesting with a retired, guilt-ridden Peter Parker. No, they saved the best stupid for last.
-So there’s a brief scene in the middle of the movie where Peter saves a little kid from some bullies. Fine, fine. Then at the very end, the Rhino is going on a rampage (his suit has a feature where he has to open up the armor over his face and chest to talk, so he probably should’ve gotten shot about five hundred times before Spider-Man showed up).
-The little kid from earlier, dressed as Spider-Man, breaks through the police barricade and runs to stand up to the Rhino, who at least is well-written enough to merely taunt the little idiot instead of blowing him away. I suppose this is meant to be inspiring instead of GODDAMN RETARDED.
-(Remember, I can use that word. Don’t you use it, though. That is MY word for OTHER PEOPLE.)
-And so we get five seconds of Spider-Man fighting the Rhino to end the movie, which was surely worth hyping up the Rhino in all the trailers and posters and shit. Because he’s in the movie for five seconds!
-Black Cat gets it worse, though. Yes, apparently the character Felicity Jones plays—an assistant to Norman Osborn who talks to Harry for three minutes—is supposed to be the Felicia Hardy, despite not looking like her, not acting like her, not being a cat burglar, not having white hair, and honestly, her boobs are not that great. If Kevin Feige were making this movie, we’d be getting Amber Heard in a push-up bra and you know it!
-I hate when comic book movies pull this shit of having a character cameo for five seconds and do nothing? It was cool when Colossus did it in X2, but that was the ONLY TIME. Emma Frost showing up in X-Men Origins: Wolverine? Fuck you. Psylocke in X-Men: The Last Stand? Bullshit. If you’re not going to give a character anything to do, why have them in the movie? I’m a cool kid, I can deal with Felicia Hardy not being in the fifth fucking Spider-Man movie (even though she should’ve been Bryce Dallas Howard’s character in Spider-Man 3, NO DEBATE). But you’re gonna use up that name for basically a day-player?
-Sure, yeah, maybe they’ll cast Amber Head in the next movie and reveal Felicity Jones was only playing some chick who happened to be named Felicia. But if that’s the case, why are you WASTING MY TIME with a character who might as well be named B.J. Cobbledick?
-Oh, and there’s an entirely pointless clip from X-Men: Days of Future Past at the end. Not even like—you couldn’t even film ten seconds of Peter Parker high-fiving Jubilee or whatever? Avengers filmed that schwarma scene the day of the premiere. You can’t get Andrew Garfield and fucking Daniel Cudmore in the same place for ten minutes? Something your average Funny Or Die video can manage? Pretty much all that clip told me is that Ink is in the movie. Ink.
-Man, Bryan Singer, I know you’re trying to beat a rap, but putting Ink in your movie is not helping. Not helping, man.
THE GOOD (again)
-Gwen Stacy dies. (SPOILER ALERT: The title character of the famous comic book story ‘The Night Gwen Stacy Dies’ ends up dead). I’m gonna count this as a positive because Gwen Stacy is such a nothing character that even though I really like Emma Stone, I’m glad her character is outie. There’s just nothing to the name Gwen Stacy except this idealized male fantasy of the perfect girlfriend—she wears short skirts but she isn’t slutty, she’s really smart but not a NEEEERD, she’s completely understanding and supportive and has no real thoughts of her own—if you’re uncomfortable dating her, she’ll break up with you FOR YOU, but when you’re ready to pick up the relationship, she takes you back immediately! And she never got on anyone else’s dick in the meantime!
-There’s just a complete void there. You want the story of Gwen Stacy? She’s the perfect girlfriend, but then she dies, so Peter is sad he doesn’t have a perfect girlfriend anymore. Her entire character arc is the opening five minutes of a revenge movie before the story gets going. Guys, I’m cool with you having blow-up dolls, but don’t make movies about them.
THE GOOD
-I liked the end credits song. I think it was by Pharrell Williams? I don’t listen to a lot of music, so I think the only songs I’ve heard of his are Blurred Lines and Happy, and both of those, the beat was kinda just too… radio jingle? It was like pure sugar, ya know, couldn’t get into it. But this song was really good. I’m probably gonna, uh… completely legally buy an MP3 of it. Thanks iPod!
-Okay, I used Google—because I’m not Spider-Man—and it turns out that song was by Kendrick Lamar and Alicia Keys. I hope you appreciate my attention to detail and the care I put into this work.
-The action sequences were pretty good. There were, like, three in a two hour and thirty minute movie and they were pretty short, too, but… anyway, they still don’t have a patch on Raimi. His action scenes told stories—Spider-Man has to save a bus full of kids, stop this train, save Mary Jane, save Aunt May, whatever. So there are goals, objectives, little victories and defeats. This is pretty much just Spider-Man and whoever he’s fighting dancing around until the budgets runs out, and it feels like there was not much of a budget. (We’re supposed to be worried about Green Goblin in Part 3 when Spider-Man beats him in, like, three minutes here?) But aside from the size of the portions, the meal was okay.
-There’s a good scene where Peter Parker is proactive and uses SCIENCE! to prepare for a rematch with Electro, even though Electro is apparently captured at the time. This moment of genre savvy from Parker ends up totally pointless, though.
-Stone and Garfield still have good chemistry, and there’s a rather nice scene where he uses physical comedy to help her get away from some goons. It makes you wish this was just a movie about two dating teenagers who happen to be tangled up with corporate espionage—which is probably a bad thing in a Spider-Man movie.
-I like the look of Electro, even if it is ridiculously derivative of Dr. Manhattan (although he has a set of leather Speedos that can apparently travel through power lines and such). But compared to how the Green Goblin or the Rhino look—fuck.
-There’s a bit where Spider-Man catches a cold that’s right out of the comics, even if they make a hacky joke of him sneezing in his mask. Thanks, movie.
-On my way home from the theater, a light was about to change red, so I sped up to make it and I passed by a cop. I was only doing, like, 47 in a 45 zone, so he didn’t pull me over.
THE BAD
-I saw a trailer for the remake of Annie before the movie. Thank God we finally have an Annie movie where Cameron Diaz gets mistaken for a hooker.
-There’s this long prologue where Peter’s father, Richard Parker, gets a flashback and apparently the filmmakers forgot he’s not a spy in this continuity, because he manages to beat up an assassin in hand-to-hand combat. That assassin is actually obscure Spider-Man villain The Total Cliché, whose superpower is talking to his targets for no reason instead of just shooting them, so they have a chance to beat him up.
-This entire scene is like the cannibal sequence in that Pirates of the Caribbean movie, where it’s basically only there so they can have some pointless action in a supposed adventure movie where all anyone ever does is sit around and talk about their feeeeeelings.
-Oh, and later in the movie they try to sell us that Richard Parker is a traitor who turned on sweet, innocent Norman Osborn, but we’ve already been shown that he was a goody and that Norman’s an asshole, so that attempted plot twist is a complete waste of time aside from being a little more of the movie with no Shailene Woodley in it.
-Gwen Stacy gives a valedictorian speech about how she’s going to die later on in the movie, but Peter shouldn’t give up hope and should bravely soldier on after only five months of apparently doing nothing but moping at Gwen’s grave. That seemed odd. You’d think she would talk about education or something.
-(I really want one of the villains in the sequel to be someone who lost a loved one during Peter’s five months of man-pain. That would be hilarious.)
-This is basically the same movie as Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, only done by complete maroons instead of cool dudes. I’ll give you an example. In Raimi’s movie, the theme is that even though Peter has good intentions in trying to protect Mary Jane by breaking up with her, he doesn’t have the right to make that choice for her. In ASM2, the theme is that Peter-slash-Gwen’s-dad absolutely have the right to make that choice for her, and by not doing so she’s condemned to a horrible death. So, uh, slightly different message there.
-The classic sixties Spider-Man theme gets way too much of a work-out there. It was cute when they worked it into the Raimi movies, but here it is EVERYWHERE. Peter’s ring-tone is the Spider-Man theme, he hums it to himself. It’s like someone focus grouped the old Spider-Man 2 and said “THEY LOVE THE CARTOON THEME SONG! GET MORE CARTOON THEME SONG IN THERE!”
-By rights, shouldn’t they be referencing the theme song to the 90s cartoon on Fox Kids? SPIDER-MAN, SPIDER-MAN, RADIOACTIVE, WHOA!
-Or hell, the Spectacular Spider-Man theme. That was great. SPEC-TACULAR SPEC-TACULAR!
-Opening scene openly rips off The Incredibles. Just replace “has to get to the wedding on time” with “has to get to graduation ceremony on time.” By the way, didn’t we reboot Spider-Man so we could get all that great storytelling with Flash Thompson and co. in high school? What happened to THAT?
-Also, can we give up the ghost on the notion that this Peter Parker is some kind of nerd or science geek? He needs to learn about batteries from Youtube, he needs Gwen Stacy to think up everything scientific he does, at his graduation ceremony he shows up late, kisses the hottest girl in school, and high-fives the dean… I would sooner believe that Andrew Garfield is playing Koogler than Peter Parker.
-The Stan Lee cameo is WEAK. The Marvel Studios movies, they come up with clever ways to get him in there—here he’s just sitting in a crowd. They couldn’t even have him handing out diplomas?
-No, no, guys, the point of Spider-Man’s quips is that he says clever, funny things so we like him. The problem with this movie is that it’s written by stupid, stupid people, so Peter says dumb, dumb things like “JUST DON’T CALL ME LATE FOR DINNER!” That’s not a quip. That’s barely even a thought. I don’t see how Saturday Night Live can come up with jokes every week, and these guys, they can’t get someone from Community to spend an hour reading the script and thinking of funny things for Peter to do or say? Captain America: The Winter Soldier, they got Abed to show up, so it’s clearly not IMPOSSIBLE.
-JUST DON’T CALL ME LATE FOR DINNER. That’s like someone saying “case of the Mondays.” If I heard someone say that shit in real life, I would have to punch them in the face. Even if it was like a little kid. It’s like doing the Nazi salute. Yeah, yeah, free speech, but there are some things modern society just shouldn’t have to tolerate.
-To continue the Spider-man 2 parallels: the filmmakers belatedly realize how monstrously unsympathetic Peter looked in the first ASM, continuing to see Gwen against her DEAD FATHER’S WISHES, so they pretty much immediately break up and entirely redo the UST storyline from Raimi’s movie. Just replace “John Jameson wants me to marry him” with “Oxford wants me to go to college in England.” Same exact story.
-We do the thing where the hero and his girlfriend can’t be together, so he stalks here from afar and it’s supposed to be romantic. Really? Still? Have these people never listened to any film criticism? That was the chief complaint about Superman Returns, and the big criticism of Spider-Man 3 was all the villains; this movie has three. It’s a reboot; can we at least get NEW MISTAKES?
-By the way, this Peter Parker would be UNBEARABLE in real life. He does shit like walking through a busy street all lovelorn at the sight of Gwen, delaying all the traffic for a million years, kissing Gwen even though she’s broken up with him, etc. I get the overwhelming impression that Andrew Garfield’s take on Spider-Man has sent quite a few dick pics. Just laying that out.
-That brings us to Jamie Foxx’s Electro. I remember thinking when news of the raceswap came out that it was really weird how we can’t make Peter Parker black, or any of the brilliant scientist villains black, but cheap thug Electro? Sure. Well, they give him a backstory where he’s supposedly a brilliant scientist—surprise—but he does not act like he has an intelligent bone in his body. In fact, I swear to God, I think this character is mentally retarded.
-(I can use that word, I have Aspergers. I am reclaiming it to refer to stupid people.)
-But Foxx’s Max Dillon isn’t the cool kind of mentally challenged, like me. *puffs cigar* This guy needs help tying his shoelaces. He thinks Spider-Man is his best friend because they met once on the street, he talks to himself as Spider-Man, he’s super-easily manipulated by Harry Osborn (in a complete rip-off of the Raimi movie’s “Harry uses Doc Ock to attack Spider-Man” plot), he enters Gwen’s floor for her in the elevator that is controlled by voice. This guy is like an episode of New Girl. A Winston episode.
-Dillon also has the clichéd ‘evil fanboy’ origin from The Incredibles and Batman Forever. It seems really like a step back that we’ve made the socially awkward, (supposedly) geeky, racially other guy into the evil villain who must be destroyed, whereas Peter Parker is now a yuppie who hangs out with hot chicks and trust-fund babies. Damn these fake geek boys!
-Most importantly, I never felt afraid of, sympathetic for, or even just interested in Foxx’s Dillon. He was simply annoying when he wasn’t blowing up buildings. The man’s an special effects reel, not a character.
-And Dillon gets his powers from being electrocuted and dropped into a tank of electric eels, which seems unlikely. Oh, did his parents genetically modify him too?
-It doesn’t help that Dillon has a whimsical theme song that makes March Of The Villains sound like The Imperial March.
-He says “It’s my birthday. Time to light my candles!” before blowing some shit up at one point. Again, movie, we have this problem where people are supposed to be saying clever, interesting things, but because you’ve left the writing in the care of people who are neither clever nor interesting, they only say things dumb-dumbs would find clever.
-Okay, there’s one good line about Jack the Ripper. You’re at notch one, movie.
-Peter makes a big Homeland collage of Oscorp files and pictures of his parents and stuff with, like, colored tape. And he puts a picture of Gwen Stacy on it with a little notecard under it and he’s written on the notecard ‘Do I have to lose you too?’ BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh my fuck, can you imagine this guy’s Instagram account? I get the feeling David Hyde Pierce would call him gay and punch him in the gut.
-Okay, after Electro is defeated for the first time—by WATER, so you’ve got a supervillain who could be taken out by Mel Gibson in Signs—he’s taken to that dumb Spider-Man Arkham rip-off from the comics and they get a cartoon ‘ve have vays of making you talk!’ Nazi to torture him? Like, literally, if you were high and you listened to this guy’s accent, you would think he was a cartoon character in a live-action movie like with Who Framed Roger Rabbit. And he tortures Electro—BY SHOCKING HIM. Which hurts him. And later, Harry Osborn shocks Electro with a taser and that lets Electro break free?
-????????
-Are you getting a picture of how fragmented this story is when I’m described all these plot elements and they have no connection to each other? Anyway, Peter’s old best friend who he’s never mentioned before, Harry Osborn comes back to town! They have a man-date for five minutes and are the bestest buddies ever until—
-Shit, I’m gonna need another dash for this. Okay, Norman Osborn is dying of MacGregor’s Syndrome. Here the movie got me, because after being played by Chris Cooper for forty seconds, Norman dies off-screen, so I assumed they would reveal he was faking his death, not that Chris Cooper was just hired to be in this movie for forty seconds. No, apparently, yeah, they just got Chris Cooper for forty seconds of daddy issues.
-But anyway, during those forty seconds, Chris Cooper reveals that Harry has THE SAME DISEASE! IT’S HEREDITARY! This comes as a big shock to Harry, although if my father were dying of a rare disease, you’d think I would at least go to the Wikipedia page and look up a few facts about it before I was in my fucking twenties.
-Now Norman Osborn has died at the terribly young age of fucking seventy, so as you can imagine, Harry is in a real rush to cure this disease that would kill him ten years before statistically he would go down anyway. Then again, this is the Spider-Man universe, where Aunt May can live to the ripe old age of 292 so long as her nephew doesn’t get married. Objection withdrawn.
--It turns out that Peter Parker has magic blood from being bitten by that spider—or that his father used their bloodline to create the spider and Peter has no other blood relatives—OR that Peter might know where Harry can get magic venom from the spider. And one of those three things will cure Harry. I think his blood? But for no reason, Peter refuses to give his DYING BEST FRIEND one drop of blood to save his life, so now after an entire five minutes of being the very best of friends, Peter and Harry ARE MORTAL ENEMIES! RAAAAAAAAGH!
-By the way, Peter breaks this to Harry in a way that seems designed to turn him into a supervillain. Harry thinks Peter knows Spider-Man because P takes pictures of him for the Bugle (no, we don’t get Jameson, Peter just sends the pictures in via e-mail—FUCK YOU, MOVIE). Peter doesn’t want to hook Harry up with dat radioactive blood, so he says he doesn’t know Spider-Man, but he’ll try. Now, since the answer is no, you’d think Peter would just say “I can’t find him anywhere!” and leave it at that. No, dressed as Spider-Man, he goes to Harry just to say “nope, no can do.” Harry takes the news of being condemned to a slow, agonizing death for no reason about as well as you’d think.
-Can I mention the separate stupidity of Peter thinking Harry is, what, just going to guzzle his blood down like Kool-Aid instead of testing it out first? Like the heads of massive biotech companies can do? And no, his stated reason for refusing isn’t that he’s afraid Oscorp will clone him or do something otherwise immoral, it’s just that he thinks Harry will shove the blood up his ass or whatever and turn into a giant monster. Reasonable concern for the Spider-Man universe, I suppose.
-Incredibly inconsequential plot machinations involving nobodies like Spencer Smythe, Donald Menken, and, uh, ‘Mr. Fiers’ ensue. Harry gets fired from owning Oscorp in, like, an afternoon, so he breaks into Ravencroft to free Electro so Electro can break him into Oscorp. I guess Harry is only Sam Fisher in buildings that begin with an R.
-Here follows a very racially uncomfortable scene where smooth-talking white boy Harry coaxes the childlike simpleton black man with incredible power into doing his bidding—I mean serious Of Mice And Men shit, here. For no reason, Electro goes along with all of Harry’s schemes until they part ways.
-Harry uses the magic spider blood and turns into a monster, which he blames on Peter for not giving him the magic human blood. So Harry straps himself into the conveniently on hand and fully operational Goblin Glider + battlesuit, which he learns how to expertly use in about forty-five minutes I think. I don’t think he’s super strong or anything, just hideously deformed, so he needs the power of his costume. But for some reason Spider-Man can’t knock him out with one punch to his absolutely unprotected face? I suppose this was an issue with Doctor Octopus too, but no one described that movie as Nolanesque, so fuck it.
-After the Times Square battle where Electro let off explosive electricity that brought down buildings, sent cars flying, and probably killed dozens, Gwen insists on going with Spider-Man to fight him in the middle of a dubstep generator (so that’s where it comes from!). Yeah, I’m thinking even if it weren’t for Harry Osborn, she would’ve gone down trying to help Peter lift a fire truck or something.
-Of course, since this is a movie, she has to do something helpful despite the monumental stupidity of her being there, so we get a reenactment of the ‘female lead needs to pull a switch to stop the bad guy’ climax from Iron Man. And, uh, Green Lantern. Yes, they crib a cribbed scene from Green Lantern. Complete with it almost killing the hero.
-You know that really embarrassing scene in Spider-Man 3 where Sandman and Venom just run into each other and decide to be Spidey-killing friends? This one-ups it. Spider-Man defeats Electro, then Green Goblin immediately shows up to take Gwen hostage. I really wanted them to keep going with the uber-awkward script structuring and have the Rhino show up just after Gwen died, but no luck.
-And of course Harry is still alive and plotting revenge without even being mildly inconvenienced, so this movie has no real ending. It doesn’t even have the balls to end on a downer note (just like the last movie) with Peter quitting Spider-Man, since we know there’s going to be an ASM3 and they could do something interesting with a retired, guilt-ridden Peter Parker. No, they saved the best stupid for last.
-So there’s a brief scene in the middle of the movie where Peter saves a little kid from some bullies. Fine, fine. Then at the very end, the Rhino is going on a rampage (his suit has a feature where he has to open up the armor over his face and chest to talk, so he probably should’ve gotten shot about five hundred times before Spider-Man showed up).
-The little kid from earlier, dressed as Spider-Man, breaks through the police barricade and runs to stand up to the Rhino, who at least is well-written enough to merely taunt the little idiot instead of blowing him away. I suppose this is meant to be inspiring instead of GODDAMN RETARDED.
-(Remember, I can use that word. Don’t you use it, though. That is MY word for OTHER PEOPLE.)
-And so we get five seconds of Spider-Man fighting the Rhino to end the movie, which was surely worth hyping up the Rhino in all the trailers and posters and shit. Because he’s in the movie for five seconds!
-Black Cat gets it worse, though. Yes, apparently the character Felicity Jones plays—an assistant to Norman Osborn who talks to Harry for three minutes—is supposed to be the Felicia Hardy, despite not looking like her, not acting like her, not being a cat burglar, not having white hair, and honestly, her boobs are not that great. If Kevin Feige were making this movie, we’d be getting Amber Heard in a push-up bra and you know it!
-I hate when comic book movies pull this shit of having a character cameo for five seconds and do nothing? It was cool when Colossus did it in X2, but that was the ONLY TIME. Emma Frost showing up in X-Men Origins: Wolverine? Fuck you. Psylocke in X-Men: The Last Stand? Bullshit. If you’re not going to give a character anything to do, why have them in the movie? I’m a cool kid, I can deal with Felicia Hardy not being in the fifth fucking Spider-Man movie (even though she should’ve been Bryce Dallas Howard’s character in Spider-Man 3, NO DEBATE). But you’re gonna use up that name for basically a day-player?
-Sure, yeah, maybe they’ll cast Amber Head in the next movie and reveal Felicity Jones was only playing some chick who happened to be named Felicia. But if that’s the case, why are you WASTING MY TIME with a character who might as well be named B.J. Cobbledick?
-Oh, and there’s an entirely pointless clip from X-Men: Days of Future Past at the end. Not even like—you couldn’t even film ten seconds of Peter Parker high-fiving Jubilee or whatever? Avengers filmed that schwarma scene the day of the premiere. You can’t get Andrew Garfield and fucking Daniel Cudmore in the same place for ten minutes? Something your average Funny Or Die video can manage? Pretty much all that clip told me is that Ink is in the movie. Ink.
-Man, Bryan Singer, I know you’re trying to beat a rap, but putting Ink in your movie is not helping. Not helping, man.
THE GOOD (again)
-Gwen Stacy dies. (SPOILER ALERT: The title character of the famous comic book story ‘The Night Gwen Stacy Dies’ ends up dead). I’m gonna count this as a positive because Gwen Stacy is such a nothing character that even though I really like Emma Stone, I’m glad her character is outie. There’s just nothing to the name Gwen Stacy except this idealized male fantasy of the perfect girlfriend—she wears short skirts but she isn’t slutty, she’s really smart but not a NEEEERD, she’s completely understanding and supportive and has no real thoughts of her own—if you’re uncomfortable dating her, she’ll break up with you FOR YOU, but when you’re ready to pick up the relationship, she takes you back immediately! And she never got on anyone else’s dick in the meantime!
-There’s just a complete void there. You want the story of Gwen Stacy? She’s the perfect girlfriend, but then she dies, so Peter is sad he doesn’t have a perfect girlfriend anymore. Her entire character arc is the opening five minutes of a revenge movie before the story gets going. Guys, I’m cool with you having blow-up dolls, but don’t make movies about them.
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Date: 2014-05-03 05:12 am (UTC)My biggest question is why anybody thought the whole Richard Parker backstory was worth of inclusion, let alone being turned into a mystery over two films. The "revelation", such as it is, is completely meaningless.