You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The Amazing Spiderman.
I liked the film. I didn’t love the film.
In the end, it didn’t take me anywhere I didn’t expect to go.
When you pay $30 dollars for 2 tickets you expect to mentally go some place without a suitcase. You want a 2 hour pass to a part of your brain that you have never seen.
Sadly, I enjoyed the trip, but when I arrived at the Spiderman Station, 2 hours away, I felt Like I was right back where I began.
Maybe I expected too much. But then again, why shouldn’t I?
At the end of the film, I got what you expect to get from a Marvel Comic brought to life.
Spider-Man is loud and big and and fast paced.
It is like visual napalm burning your optic nerve.
The sound track invades your auditory canal like a Seal Team 6 mission in your skull.
The dialogue is snappy; one part J.D Salinger, one part Bazooka Joe.
The teenager behind me found so many lines fall down funny, I wondered if he wrote the script.
In cinematic parlance; Spider-Man 2 is high concept which usually means it is big on C.G. & special effects.
The action is furious from the start but it fizzles toward the end.
And that my friends is a direct result of deficiencies in the story.
You can only put so much million dollar lipstick on a pig before you figure out you are kissing a pig.
In fact, the film’s resolution is more complicated than registering for Obama-care.
What happened to Electro? How do you kill electricity? How do you even fight it?
What happened to the Harry Osborn mutant? Did he decide to take a nap at the end?
Who was that Russian guy in the armored rhinoceros rocket launcher? And why are millions of New Yorkers so willing to stand behind a wooden police barricade while missiles explode a 100 feet away?
I know New Yorkers think they are bad ass, but really folks, come on?
I think the problem with Spider-Man 2 is is the protagonist has no credible antagonists to battle.
I love Jamie Foxx. But his character is sour like raw chicken left in the sun. His human character, Max Dillon is too many things. He is sad in a quasi retarded, socially awkward kind of way. He is also a purportedly brilliant janitor-electrical engineer who anonymously invented the electrical grid for a city that nobody knows about. That’s a stupid bio if I ever heard one.
And if that’s not hard enough to over come as a character, Foxx then transforms into an electric monster who calls himself Electro. He is powerful and appears to be a worthy adversary for Spider-Man in a steel octagon fighting kind of way. But the audience never really believes that Electro can kill Spider-Man with all the blue electricity he spews from his fingertips. In fact, I am underwhelmed by his powers throughout the film.
Electro can fly and fire electric cannon balls and disappear into the electrical grid only to reappear at will. But for half the movie, he is weaker than wet paper, tied up in some secret lab being studied by a German scientist who has no clear motivation.
At one point, the powerful Electro breaks the scientists eye glasses with his electric aura. All I can say is, Wow, that was underwhelming.
A super hero needs a worthy adversary and Electro is a helpless lap dog who inhales electricity and talks in a deep voice.
Foxx becomes evil after he falls into a tank of electric eels. Had he simply died a gruesome electric eel induced death, then there would be no Electro.
That would have helped this film’s plot development substantially.
Less Electro means Spider-Man has other things to battle, like his reputation as a vigilante.
Spider-Man dealing with his own demons and those of a populous who doesn’t understand him is far more interesting a plot twist than multiple battle scenes with made up monsters who hate Spider-Man because, and correct me if I’m wrong, Spiderman forgot Electro’s name was Max.
If that was motivation, I’d be hurling electric balls of stupid all over the planet.
“What’s your name again?”
ZAAAAPPP!
And then there’s the other made up nemesis; his one time friend, Dane Dehaan who plays Harry Osborn.
This Billionaire’s transformation into bad guy is so badly planned, it’s like a three stooges episode injects itself with spider venom.
The conflict between the billionaire and his one time friend has richness and could have been developed into something meaningful.
But like Electro, when Spider-Man won’t give his friend some spider-blood, the boy billionaire loses his mind, cries like the little billionaire bitch he is, then injects himself with radioactive spider juice, transforming into a Satan like mutant who rides a rocket sled.
This bad guy is so ridiculous, it’s like a stew of left-over ideas and badly thought out concepts.
It’s so inane, I had to keep myself from screaming at the screen in disgust.
What did I like?
I like Spider-Man. I’ve always loved Spider-Man. The cartoons in the 70’s had more depth, more darkness, were more believable.
I like the way Spidy moves, and I like the way he thinks and I like that he is a super hero who is a kid trying to find his way in a world where finding your way is hard enough.
I like that Spider-Man is an acrobat and not hopped up on cinematic steroids. I like that he is strong like a spiderweb built of steel.
I like that he is in love with a girl that he cannot have but has to have. I like that he has to unravel the mystery of who his father is and why his parents left him on his aunt’s door step.
Andrew Garfield is Peter Parker / Spider-Man. He’s believable as a college kid who fights crime in his spare time.
Emma Stone is Gwen Stacy, Spiderman’s girlfriend. I have never found her believable as a high school girl. She looks like she has been around the block a time or two. I have a feeling if she and Spider-Man ever did hook up, she’d curl his toes and he’d loose his web quicker than a superhero would want to admit.
Stacy is a college freshman who is going to Oxford. OK, she’s smart. But how smart? So smart that she is a teenager with unprecedented intern access to the world’s biggest research facility?
The story has so many constant leap of faith moments, you need a web just to swing from sad ass plot point to sad ass plot point.
It’s the number one movie in the world.
That’s how they gauge these things now-a-days. That means it made a lot of money.
Congrats!
But it’s not the number one movie in the world from a story stand point.
The Amazing Spider-Man is a nice escape from reality.
But at the end of the day, I think the 30 minute cartoon I watched as a boy was more satisfying.
Life’s Crazy