The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)

This was a much more entertaining mess than the previous one. Too long, too focused on the utterly uninteresting mystery of Peter's parents' deaths/disappearance, and still wildly overconfident about its likelihood to spawn (multiple!) sequels. But I liked parts of it. Specifically, pretty much every part that Spider-Man was in. Not Peter though. This version of Peter sucks.

Aunt May is also in this film. Still doesn't do much.

I will say, to the film's credit, that Peter only feels like a completely different character when he's Spider-Man, not in every other scene as in the previous movie. But the consistent character they've gone with is no fun. He's always sulking and constantly looks like he just smelled something disgusting. And the movie always feels extremely slow when he's on-screen. Although his ringtone being the Spider-Man theme was quite funny so I enjoyed that.

Oh, and Peter keeps hallucinating Gwen's dad, which makes him sad.

Gwen is equally unpleasant to watch. She can't seem to decide whether she wants to stop Peter from being Spider-Man or break up with him because he's Spider-Man. She says that she likes that he's Spider-Man, but her frustration and disgust every time she realises he's off Spider-Manning is extremely obvious. Not that any of the characters react to it, so I'm not sure if that was in the script or was just something the actor or director decided on.

"Peter, are you Spider-Manning again? You know I hate that!"

Fortunately, the villains in this one are quite good. Max is a little weak as a character, but his first encounter with Spider-Man as Electro is the highlight of the film. His second fight with Spider-Man is decent, but that first one is pretty much perfect. Spider-Man is great, and the scene really demonstrates the kind of super hero he is and why people love him. And Max's confusion seems to make sense here as he's just transformed into Electro and really shouldn't be expected understand what's happening. Unfortunately that's not the explanation - he's just a weird little confused guy all the time - but in that scene it works.

Weird how absolutely nothing is made of the fact that the cops fuck up
the meeting with Electro by resorting to unnecessary violence.

Dane DeHaan as Harry Osborne is incredible. I thought he was going to be entirely bland and unlikeable at first, but then the scene happens where Peter comes to see him and a whole other side of him comes out. And each facet of his personality that we see feels genuine. The only problem is that we don't get enough of him. His story felt rushed and he was obviously supposed to come back as the main villain for the next movie, which obviously never happened.

Norman/Harry's assistant has a weirdly prominent role in the film for someone
with no character arc or apparent motivation. Sequel plans, maybe?

The big problem with this film, aside from the sequel-baiting and unnecessary inclusion of the whole backstory about Peter's parents, is that the two villains didn't really seem to work well together. Their team-up was a little forced and didn't really amount to anything. The plot does justify them working together (however briefly) but it didn't need to. It probably would have worked a lot better if they'd kept Harry as a minor character in this one, not had him go goblin-mode, and made Electro the sole villain. After all, they were clearly expecting to make another movie after this one with Harry as the bad guy.

Goblin-mode Harry is perfect.

The ending was also a bit of an anticlimax. Gwen's death was done really well. I think it probably had the right amount of impact whether you were expecting it or not. Unfortunately it happened too late - right at the end of the climactic fight. That leaves the film with nowhere to really go, so it sort of just trails off a bit. It does leave on a high note with the fight against Rhino, but it felt more like a video game or TV show. In fact, the entire movie felt a lot like the Arrowverse shows.

And then there's the "alternate ending" deleted scene. Finally we understand why Ben never said the line; they were holding it back for Peter's real dad to say! It's so bad it's funny. I also love that Peter's dad shows up, miraculously still alive, and just causally mentions that his mother died off-screen. If it was a TV show you'd assume they couldn't get the actor back so they had to write her out, but they had new footage of her at the start of the movie so there was no problem getting her. They just decided to make her dead for no reason. And then they cut the whole thing, leaving their fates weirdly ambiguous.

Oh, did I forget to mention Peter's dad's secret science bunker?
There is so much pointless garbage padding this film out.

One final note: Peter refusing to give Harry his blood because it's too dangerous is some all-time Spider-dumb. It really seems like he thinks Harry would just take the blood and inject it into himself with no testing or safety measures. Which, to be fair, is kind of what he does when he gets the spider venom that turns him into he Green Goblin later, but Peter has no reason to make that assumption. And he tells Harry that they need more time, but he's not doing any testing or experimenting so... time for what, Peter?

I guess J Jonah Jameson is technically in this film.

I wouldn't recommend this movie, but it's definitely better than the previous one. Closer to Spider-Man 3 in quality: a failure, but an entertaining one, whose greatest crimes are that it's too long and could have been a lot better.

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