2 Much

After the 2012's The Amazing Spider-man, I was eager to see what the assembled group could do with a sequel. Though I was bored by the first film's unnecessary rehash of the character's origin story, I loved the casting and felt there was good potential for the follow-up. But then the reviews came out for The Amazing Spider-man 2, and they were generally unkind. I decided I'd wait for Blu-ray and catch up then. As it turned out, lowered expectations were a good thing; the movie was not the embarrassing disaster I'd been led to believe.

Again, as with the first installment, you can thank the cast for everything that's good about the movie. Andrew Garfield is still a fun and exuberant hero. Emma Stone again makes Gwen Stacy a more witty and potent character than the original trilogy's Mary Jane Watson. Together, the two are an immensely likeable couple with charisma and chemistry to spare. Sally Field shines once again as Aunt May, bringing great emotional weight to her too few, too brief scenes. Campbell Scott, returning for a more expanded role as Peter Parker's father, brings similar pathos.

The new cast members are quite good too. Jamie Foxx makes a painfully awkward Max Dillon (if a somewhat less effective) Electro. Dane DeHann offers a quite different and more nuanced take on Harry Osborn than the original trilogy's James Franco, at times both more and less pitiable, and certainly a more credible villain-in-the-making. Paul Giamatti has little screen time, but chews the scenery with relish during his scenes. And Chris Cooper manages to make Norman Osborn sufficiently contemptible, even though the few moments in which we see him afford little opportunity.

The actors are great, and so individual moments -- even whole scenes -- really do shine because of it. But the story itself is an overcrowded mess. Ultimately, it feels like the longest "scenes from next week's episode" trailer for a TV show you've ever seen. Because the writers are trying to fit so much into one movie, each of the different subplots is missing one or two of the scenes it needed to be told well. Dillon/Electro goes from idolizing Spider-man to despising him in the span of a single scene, and with no apparent justification deeper than "he's crazy." Aunt May is sacrificing to find money to put Peter through college... except we don't know what Peter hopes to study, or if he's even planning to go to college at all. We're told about the long time friendship between Peter and Harry, but there really isn't much time spent showing it. Gwen and Peter (minor spoiler) break up with little justification for "why now and not sooner?" and then get back together later with no work at all, because there simply isn't time for friction.

But at least all that stuff gets more space than the perfunctory set-up for Sony's version of "Marvel's Cinematic Universe." Every movie studio with a comic book license has made no secret of the fact that they're trying to get themselves a billion-dollar Avengers-style blockbuster with a raft of related movies. Here, those efforts lead unsatisfying results. Some flaws are easily overlooked or forgiven, like the odd casting of B.J. Novak for a handful of lines (just because he's meant to be a supervillain in some later film), or the squandering of someone with the acting chops of Paul Giamatti when you could have gotten any muscle-bound former athlete to play his tiny role here. But then there are the significant plot developments crammed into an almost-epilogue after the wrapping up of the Electro plotline -- events that really deserved their own film. Ten minutes of the film carry so much weight, in such a compressed span of time, that it crushes the life out of the finale.

There's also something that apparently had comic fans complaining, the teasing of a future involving the Sinister Six by way of showing their signature gear in the background during a scene set in an Oscorp vault. As comic purists, those people voiced objections to the way these villains' origins have all been disposed of, apparently in favor of making Oscorp the root of all evil. As a non-comic purist, I'll voice my own skepticism of this change: it seems to me that it reduces all of these potential characters to a simplistic parade of psychopaths, each armed with a different bit of secret military hardware. I'm not tantalized, I'm fearing monotony.

But ultimately, I have to say that The Amazing Spider-man 2 is worth seeing. The whole is hopelessly flawed, but the parts are fantastic. Almost every single scene that comes is wonderfully realized as an island unto itself. Each made me long for the more sensible, less compressed movie in which that moment would be a vital part. When the scenes lasted long enough, I would forget the short attention span whole and just enjoy it for what it was -- and that happened enough for me to give the movie a B overall. But I also think the reported delay on The Amazing Spider-man 3 is wise. The creative forces behind this franchise should rethink trying to cram decades of comic history into a mere two hours.