SPIDEY 4 becomes AMAZING becomes Marvel's SPIDER-MAN

[Ben]

So I saw ASM2 last night.

Overall, it's a "meh". An amazingly well made "meh", but a "meh" all the same.

I will say the visual effects are excellent. From the opening swinging through New York, it's clear Imageworks have finally put their bendy human animation behind them. There's also a *lot* of throwaway humor here too, as Spidey packs off a villain who we haven't seen the last of. Perhaps too many jokes in this opening sequence, although it's entertaining.

Out of everything that felt wrong about ASM, I liked Garfield and continue to like him here. Indeed, seeing Spider-Man 3 the other day on TV I was reminded just how bad the Imageworks animation had been and how short and squidgy Tobey Maguire looked in the suit. Garfield is tall and lean, and the new suit (which frustratingly goes unmentioned) is classic Spidey all the way (save for the arm webbing, natch!), and Garfield looks great in it, even if sometimes the new bigger, buggier eyes look slightly a little *too* large.

The animation is near-perfect too...I spotted maybe two or three counts where the melding between an on-set shot and CG were noticeable, while there are several shots that are clearly CG, but mostly spotted because of what the characters are doing at that point.

Emma Stone continues to be adorable in mostly anything she's in (you should all see Easy A pronoto; when I saw that a couple of years ago it was clear this young lady was going to be someone to watch), and the best scenes of the film are her interplay with (real-life boyfriend) Garfield. Without spoiling anything specific (although it's an open secret about her "fate" in the storyline), there's a shot late in the movie that is *devastating* in the sheer beauty of the visual effects and how the moment is achieved, so quick it's over before it happens, questioning for a moment, "did that actually just happen!?"...

Also well worthy of praise is Hans Zimmer's score (yes, Zimmer replaces James "the hack" Horner, though I wasn't sure if any themes were carried over). I thought Horner's score for the first ASM was what he might have written for James Cameron's aborted 1980s take...the music certainly sounded like an old-school 80s throwback to me in that film, but Zimmer here achieves the near-impossible, combining that feel with a contemporary update. If only his score for Man Of Steel could have included the optimism (and triumphant fanfare!) found here, moving away from the MediaVentures-heavy percussion motifs and tired cliches and returning to "proper" movie scoring for the first time in years, I think. I hope he comes back for future installments, as they'd certainly be a reason to go and see new films in the series.

So, some pretty good there...but there's also the not-so-good. The story is rushed, a little like Revenge Of The Sith, where all the pre-required dots just have to be joined up. We have to be introduced to Harry Osbourne, the Gwen Stacy relationship has to expand (or not, given the promise Parker made to her Dad in the first one), and we need to have a super-villain (or two, or three) thrown into the mix.

As such, Jamie Foxx here is almost embarrassing. It's not all his fault: he character is so underwritten as to nearly be a joke, but the simplistic way he plays an invisible dweeb is too cliche, and the lines like "he knew my name" or "she noticed me" must have even looked ridiculous on the page long before they filmed them. As Electro, the VFX guys have fun with all the electricity, but there doesn't seem to be a consistency here: Electro's reasoning doesn't always make sense. That his character spews lines that sound like they were written by a five-year old doesn't help either: he has no weight, is too cliched and caricatured, and, really, after a while all the electricity stuff just gets to be the wrong side of boring.

As Harry, DeHann all-too-much kept reminding me of a young Leonardo DiCaprio; a young, but very sickly looking, Leonado DiCaprio. Again an underwritten character, this Harry is pretty mixed up even before he starts to go nuts and go all Green Goblin on us. Given everything else that's happening in the film, Osbourne doesn't get much screentime, and his young age plays against him: Franco in Raimi's trilogy was more suited to the character, I thought, and easily had more gravitas. Here, Harry's sour from the outset and it's only a matter of time before he's going to go off the rails, leading to a predictability that the film can't shake (and its own issues of how to retell things we have only just seen in the last few years but in as different a way as possible), even if his Goblin - when he eventually comes - is actually pretty cool.

Adding to the changes, the whole Richard Parker (no, not the tiger) backstory starts to get elaborated upon, in fragments through the film...but there's one scene, in which Peter finds his Dad's old James Bond style secret lair, that is frankly laughable at where it's located and how it is discovered (I mean, who *pays* for this stuff and for all the electricity that reveals and runs it!?). That said, I do hope they make use of it as a fortress of solitude for Spidey in later films...otherwise it's a pretty quick and redundant moment.

Product placement for Sony products is also annoying - every single screen or laptop is a Sony, naturally, which I can get behind since they paid for the movie. But there's no reason the camera should always include the logo, sometimes too obviously so, and I counted four or five Sony logo reminders in the credits themselves, from the new Columbia logo prefaced by a giant SONY to right at the end where we get what are basically advertisements for the Sony brand ("make.believe", "3D World", etc, and several repeats of the Sony logo).

The end credit sting is also worthless - rather than give us anything on the Sinister Six (which is set up, along with nods to possible sequel villains, numerous times in the film), it inserts a 30 second teaser spot for X-Men that's really not worth sticking around for (there's nothing right at the end of the movie either). Shoved right into the end credits, it's clear this was a late-thinking insert, since you can see where the two frames that have been cut into to allow the insert would join up again for future home video and TV showings where the X-Men clip would be removed.

It won't be missed...this is really nothing special, basically just showing Rogue becoming various people to simply walk into a secure area, and not much more than that. It actually left a sour taste in my mouth...simply a marketing gimmick as opposed to getting us excited about another outing, and it felt cheap and manipulative. Some comics geeks in the row behind me, who had been flipping out over the main movie, said it all when one went, "oh, that was it?" about the supposedly super-exclusive X-clip...

Overall the movie is enjoyable, but it's a shame that the story is just a series of plot points, that Foxx's Electro is a 1D character and villain, and that the Goblin doesn't show up until quite late. The battles between Spidey and Electro become quite tired quite quickly (yay, more city carnage) and their central fight in Times Square is bizarre in that the NYC location itself feels very fake at times, while at others there are clearly extras being held back by barriers that magically appear (yeah, one could say the police placed them there to protect the public...but c'mon, really!? In three seconds?).

And again in this "movie Times Square" the billboards are all Sony-aimed, mostly promoting Blu-ray Disc in one prominent ad, while another doesn't try to hide a giant Disney logo in the background, presumably to keep Spidey's new legal parents a little happier (and don't forget that, while Sony own the movie rights, Disney does enjoy a hefty license fee, hence the Marvel Entertainment co-pro branding).

Garfield and Stone apart, ASM2 isn't a patch on Raimi's second film, though many of the same themes and characters are touched upon. Structurally the film doesn't really work, but it's like a McDonald's burger...you'll like it while watching, and forget it by the next morning. As an artistic piece of even commercial filmmaking, it doesn't reach the heights of other, similar fare...but as a slice of pure Hollywood franchise product, this is about as slick, soulless and superior as they come.



EDIT:
Forgot to mention that in the foyer was a big stand for Maleficent: having only seen the trailers, I had no idea that Linda Wolverton had written the screenplay and that Don Hahn is an executive producer...my expectations just shot up a little higher for that one!

[eddievalient]

Considering how thoroughly, completely horrible the first ASM was, I'm not expecting any of these new films to be good, so if ASM 2 upgrades to mediocre, I'll settle for that. I'm in that weird place of wanting to see the new film and hoping it will be better than the last one, especially since the trailers do make it look a lot better, but at the same time trying not to get my hopes up lest I be disappointed yet again.

I'm not totally opposed to a different take on Spidey if it's well done (for example, the Ultimate comics were a brilliant reinvention), but the first ASM took everything that makes the character and story work and threw it out the window in favor of making it more "hip". This more than anything shows that they don't understand Spider-Man. At all. Peter Parker was always a "loveable loser" and Toby Maguire nailed that absolutely perfectly. While I'll admit Garfield does look the part, removing the "loser" aspect and trying to make him more "cool" completely destroys the character and, really, he's Spider-Man in name only. Love 'em or hate 'em, Raimi's films, including the third one, were excellent adaptations that managed to stay true to the spirit of the comics all the way to the final frame. Marc Webb is a hack.

[Ben]

Can't argue with that!

The new film continues "cool Peter" to an extent, and you're never worried he's ever in any danger. As I said, it's just plot points strung together with the lightest of webbing...

[EricJ]

The end credit sting is also worthless - rather than give us anything on the Sinister Six (which is set up, along with nods to possible sequel villains, numerous times in the film), it inserts a 30 second teaser spot for X-Men that's really not worth sticking around for
It won't be missed...this is really nothing special, basically just showing Rogue becoming various people to simply walk into a secure area, and not much more than that.

A) Doesn't Fox have X-Men (in the US), and B) was Rogue blue, by any chance?

EDIT: Forgot to mention that in the foyer was a big stand for Maleficent: having only seen the trailers, I had no idea that Linda Wolverton had written the screenplay and that Don Hahn is an executive producer...my expectations just shot up a little higher for that one!

For Hahn, or Woolverton??

[Ben]

Marc Webb was supposed to do a movie for Fox. Instead of that, Sony allowed Fox to insert the X-clip into the crédits so that Webb can stay at Sony and make more of these movies. It's the same everywhere: Fox has X-Men worldwide (Rogue was all sorts of colors, but mostly blue, yes).


For both Hahn and Woolverton, obviously. The last time those two were credited on a movie together, it didn't turn out so bad...

[EricJ]

Marc Webb was supposed to do a movie for Fox. Instead of that, Sony allowed Fox to insert the X-clip into the crédits so that Webb can stay at Sony and make more of these movies. It's the same everywhere: Fox has X-Men worldwide (Rogue was all sorts of colors, but mostly blue, yes).

(So, what was Mystique doing, then?)

For both Hahn and Woolverton, obviously. The last time those two were credited on a movie together, it didn't turn out so bad...

And the last time Woolverton was, without Hahn, was Tim Burton's Alice. Hahn couldn't have saved THAT.
(And I'm pretty sure this one owes a little more origin to the latter.)

[Randall]

Great Spidey review, Ben. You should write reviews for a living!

The movie sounded like it owuld be in trouble once they kept announcing more and more people to play villains. Sigh. They never learn.

I liked the first one okay, but still saw no need for a reboot. I like the *idea* of the Mr. & Mrs. Parker mystery, but other than that, there wasn't enough in ASM that came off as fresh enough to justify its existence... except, of course, for the great work by the leads, though they're too old for their parts as written. They should have just set new films in Peter's college years.

[Dacey]

Adding to the changes, the whole Richard Parker (no, not the tiger)

And on that note, I wonder how many people have realized this....

[Ben]

Rogue...Mystique...what's the difference!

[EricJ]

Rogue...Mystique...what's the difference!

(I think she'd take that question personally... )

[ShyViolet]

OMG I loved that ep when I was younger! Now that's the Rogue I want to see!

[Vernadyn]

I wasn't planning to see this in the theater, but some friends were going, so I went for the company. Anyway, ASM 2 manages the unenviable feat of seeming both too long and too short. It's actually about the same length as The Avengers, and there are many interminable sequences where nothing really interesting happens. As a whole, though, the movie feels like a set-up for the sequels, and there's something off about it that prevents it from cohering into an entity that can stand on its own. Say what you will about The Two Towers, but that seemed like a reasonably complete movie (Desolation of Smaug, on the other hand…)

The final battle, with the exception of one admittedly crucial aspect, dramatically feels like it should be the mid-film action sequence, not the climax. And the action itself is not as exciting as it was in the Raimi films. Spider-Man 3 had some grievous flaws, but the action sequences in that film (and the previous two) were highly kinetic and exhilarating, while the ones in the ASM series, while flashy and large-scale, seem rote. In Raimi's films, I truly felt like I was going on a thrill ride when the action came along.

One moment that made me cringe was when Goblin laughed "evilly." It worked for Willem Defoe because he could make it sound totally unhinged and deranged, but DeHaan, whatever his other merits as an actor, sounds like a kid pretending to be a giant monster destroying his Lego creations.

Zimmer's score was better than his score to Man of Steel (though pretty much anything would be), but I still found it lacking. (And no, I wasn't the biggest fan of Horner's score either.) I actually thought he could have gone further with his Electro stuff and written a main theme that went a bit more beyond Copland. If you're going to use traditional orchestra, make it well-written, and if you're going to use unconventional sounds, then don't be afraid to go the whole hog--especially if you're Hans Zimmer, the most powerful, dominant film composer in the business! Too often, it feels like Zimmer (or whichever of the six other magnificent writers was responsible for a particular cue) is approaching something new, then shies away back into generic pulsing electronic ostinatos. I'll cut him some slack since it's better than most of what he's done recently, but he's still got a ways to go before I consider burning time listening to a new score of his on Spotify, much less buy the CD. (By contrast, I've been getting into a lot of his pre-1999 work recently.)

I'd be hard-pressed to say whether I enjoyed this more than ASM 1--I wouldn't be perturbed in the slightest if I never saw either one again. But right now, the main impression I got was a long set-up--and I'm not particularly interested in the payoff. On the other hand, I'm keenly looking forward to future films in the Marvel Studios (Disney-owned) canon.

[gaastra]

AMC movie talk review. Spoilers! Man they slam this film!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZiWD5M4uKI

[Randall]

Everyone is piling on! Haven't seen too much good about it, aside from praising the leads. I'll wait for the Blu-ray before I see it.

[gaastra]

You think thats bad! One guy on the transformers boards won free tickets to see it and others told him he overpaid!