The Amazing Spider-Man 2

2014 super spider sequel

Rating: 10/20 (Emma: 25/20)

Plot: Spider-Man tries to save New York from Blue Electricity Man.

I liked this about as much as I thought I would. What I'm surprised about is how much I didn't like Andrew Garfield, the reason my daughter gave this a 25/20. I reread my notes for the first of these movies where Spider-Man is amazing, and I apparently liked him in that one. Here, he just didn't work for me at all. One problem I've always had with Spider-Man, even though he was probably my second favorite superhero when I was a little fellow, is his penchant for witticisms. I just think it makes the superhero seem less likable as he's whizzing through the air delivering bad puns while people's lives are in danger and property's being damaged. And as he's whizzing through action sequences in what isn't exactly a quiet city anyway, I'm not sure we should be able to hear him anyway. Maybe that's my problem with all this.

Or maybe it's the lack of Firestar. Where's my Firestar movie?

Maybe the next reboot--the reboot of the reboot--should be Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends.

The story here isn't very good, and the villain isn't all that interesting. There's a corporation run by Peter's friend Harry Osborn after the death of Harry's father, and they're up to no good. It doesn't matter what they're up to exactly because none of it can be as heinous as the acting of Dane DeHaan who plays Harry. He was good in Kill Your Darlings, but I'm not sure what he thinks he's doing here. Of course, even people like me who don't know anything about comic books know that Harry's going to end up becoming all Green Gobliny. When he does, it's a little anticlimactic and feels tacked on. His appearance leads to a character's pointless death and not much else. The main baddie is Electro played by Jamie Foxx who probably has better things to do. Electro's big and mean and powerful and all, but after the initial scene where we get to see him do some stuff, it just seems like all the character's potential has been realized.

Spider-Man really has some of the lamest bad guys. I can really only think of one that I'd like to see in a movie, and he was already in the second movie of the last trilogy. At the end of this one, a robotic rhinoceros comes along to wreak havoc, and I was pretty sure I'd heard of a legitimate Spider-Man villain called The Rhino. Turns out, I'm right.

That's how he looks in the comic apparently, a hulking thing with muscles that don't really exist. I've seen rhinoceroses before, but I've never seen one with those kinds of muscles. And here's how he looks in this movie:

Come on! That's not ridiculous? Rhindiculous!

The special effects are sleak enough although the action sequences are a little jumpy and boring. It's the human drama that isn't really effective at all. It's all just sort of a cartoonish waste of time.

It was nice to spend some time with Emma though even though she asked if there was "something wrong with [my] brain" after I told her I didn't like this much.