The last twenty minutes of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 are the best thing either of these films has done, and I’d have traded most of what comes before to get there faster. That’s the whole review, really. There’s a genuinely wrenching film buried in here and it keeps getting interrupted by a studio building a franchise out loud.
Let’s do the ending first, because it’s what I’ll remember. Gwen falls down the clock tower shaft. Peter fires a web after her, and the film shows you the web reaching her a fraction of a second after she hits the ground. I knew it was coming. I’ve read the comic, I’ve known how this goes since I was a kid, and it still knocked the wind out of me. It’s faithful to the 1973 issue in the way that matters, which isn’t the choreography, it’s the awfulness of a man doing everything right and being slightly too slow. Marc Webb doesn’t flinch and doesn’t cut away, and Andrew Garfield plays the aftermath better than anything else in either picture.
Garfield keeps getting better while the scripts get worse
He’s looser in the mask here than he was two years ago, and he was already good at that. The quipping has more confidence to it, the swinging has more joy in it, and the scenes where he’s just being a boyfriend who can’t shut up are consistently the most watchable stretches of the film. I said after the first one that giving Peter his voice back inside the mask was the clearest upgrade from the Raimi era, and that holds. He’s a properly funny Spider-Man now.
The grief work is what surprised me. Garfield has to carry a long stretch at the end where the film goes quiet, five months pass, and Peter simply stops. Standing at a grave in the snow, being talked into getting up by his aunt, and none of it plays as an actor doing Sad Acting. It’s better than the script around it deserves, and Sally Field does a lot of quiet heavy lifting opposite him.
The parents thread from the first film also finally gets sorted, and I’m glad it’s done. Richard Parker fled Oscorp because Norman wanted his work weaponised, there’s a hidden lab in a disused subway station, and the spiders were coded to Parker DNA. I flagged that last part two years ago as the bit I was least comfortable with, and having it confirmed outright doesn’t make me like it more. Peter being chosen rather than unlucky is a smaller story than the one I grew up on. At least the film stops dangling it and gets on with things.
Emma Stone is still the best thing in these films and I don’t think it’s close. Gwen wins the Oxford scholarship, decides she’s going, and chooses her own life over the relationship. That’s a real character making a real decision, and it’s the best-written thing in the picture. Which makes what happens next sit awkwardly with me. The film gives her more agency than anyone else on screen and then requires her to die so Peter can feel something. I’ve gone back and forth on it. The comic did it first and the comic earned it, and I think this earns it too, mostly, but the sequencing bothers me. She chooses her future and the plot immediately takes it off the table.
Two villains, neither of whom works
Electro is the bigger miss and it’s a casting problem more than a writing one. Jamie Foxx is great. He’s also far too big a presence and far too big a voice to sell Max Dillon as an invisible nobody nobody notices. I never once believed this man was being overlooked. The setup wants a pitiable nothing who curdles into a monster, and what’s on screen is a movie star doing an impression of a nothing, and the two halves never meet.
The sound design around him is legitimately the most interesting craft decision in the film. Electro’s theme is built out of whispering voices, his own internal monologue leaking into the score, and when it works it’s genuinely unsettling. Then he becomes a glowing blue man shouting in Times Square and all of that gets thrown away for a light show.
Harry Osborn is the more frustrating one because there’s a good film in him. Dane DeHaan is compelling for an hour. A dying kid who thinks his friend has the cure in his veins and won’t hand it over is a strong, nasty idea, and the scenes between DeHaan and Garfield have real venom. Then the film remembers it has forty minutes left and needs a Green Goblin, so he takes the venom, deforms, and is in the mask for about ten minutes before the credits. That arc needed its own movie. Den of Geek’s review made the same point about the compression, and Empire landed in a similar place. Paul Giamatti turns up as the Rhino for roughly four minutes at the end, in a mech suit, clearly as a trailer for something else.
What annoys me about both of them is that the raw material was there. A man nobody sees who gets the power to be seen is a good Spider-Man villain. A best friend dying of something inherited who decides his friend is hoarding the cure is a better one, and it’s the version of Harry the comics spent years building toward. Neither idea is bad. They’re both starved, because a film with two origins and a third villain cameo has roughly forty minutes to spend on character work and spends most of it on Peter instead. Willem Dafoe got a whole picture to be the Green Goblin in. DeHaan gets a corridor and a costume change.
This is Spider-Man 3’s mistake, made differently
Three villains again. I sat there doing the arithmetic and thinking about how I complained that Spider-Man 3 had too many villains and not enough film, and here we are, seven years on, watching a studio make the same call for a different reason. Raimi’s version was overstuffed because the third act kept adding things. This one is overstuffed on purpose, because Sony wants a shared universe and every extra character is a down payment on a film that doesn’t exist yet.
What makes it sting is that I’ve now seen it done properly twice. The Avengers built to something across five films and paid it off, and Captain America: The Winter Soldier came out six weeks ago and managed to be a complete, tense, self-contained thriller that also moved the larger story forward. Neither of those films stopped dead to advertise. This one does, repeatedly, and you can feel the seams.
I’m sceptical about the plan, and I think I’m entitled to be. There’s a Sinister Six film dated and an Amazing Spider-Man 3 dated, and on this evidence I don’t know that the people making these decisions know what they’ve got. What they’ve got is Garfield and Stone and a director who can shoot a heartbreak. What they keep doing with it is homework for the next instalment.
Where it leaves me
Three, maybe three and a half at the very top end. It’s an uneven film with a great forty minutes in it, and I can’t rate it much higher when so much of the running time is admin.
Here’s the thing that keeps nagging me though. Spider-Man is far and away my favourite comic book character, and outside of a handful of scenes that genuinely match the comics, these movies keep falling short of what he should be doing and being. Not the casting. The casting’s fine. It’s the stories and the villains, film after film, treating him as a delivery mechanism for a franchise rather than as a kid from Queens who can’t catch a break.
If there’s any way to get Spider-Man into the MCU, I think that’s the only route that actually saves him from whatever Sony keeps doing to the character. I know how unlikely that sounds. Two studios, a rights deal nobody has any reason to sign, and a character too valuable to share. But I’ve watched what that other universe does with people, and I’d like my favourite to get a turn.