![]() Despite earning the company a solid profit it led to a lot of soul-searching and indecision within the company. With a global gross of US$709 million dollars it was the lowest-grossing of the five Spider-Man films up to that time. They did it in a hurry – Amazing Spider-Man 2 tries to launch at least three films – and they did it very poorly. So much potential is wasted and ruined, because Sony saw the success that Marvel Studios was finding with an interconnected community of films and – knowing the value of what they had in Spider-Man – tried to generate their own shared universe. A climactic plot point that should hold enormous weight happens so arbitrarily that its potential is left utterly wasted, and besides it is foreshadowed with such glaring obviousness that half the audience expected it to happen anyway. ![]() ![]() Then he actually turns up as the Goblin, and the film becomes remarkably embarrassing. This is usually a weak point for superhero movies, but the development of Harry Osborn as the Green Goblin made narrative sense and progressed in a believable manner. In the lead-up to Spider-Man’s final fight against Electro I was impressed at how well the film had organically generated multiple villains. The film staggers quite badly at its climax. The action sequences are also for the most part well shot and choreographed. I’m usually not one to marvel at visual effects – they’re there to tell a story, so individual pieces of eye candy aren’t typically worth mentioning – but the work here looks genuinely impressive. ![]() Visually the film looks great, particularly the visual effects used to bring Electro to life. Paul Giamatti is weirdly inserted into the film’s beginning and end as Alexei Sytsevich, aka the ridiculously unconvincing super-villain the Rhino, and simply feels like yet more foreshadowing for The Amazing Spider-Man 3. The supporting cast are similarly strong, notably Jamie Foxx, Sally Field, Colm Feore and a wonderfully creepy Dane DeHaan as Harry Osborn. It has been some years since I published this review, and can only reiterate that an unrelated Garfield/Stone romantic comedy would be very welcome. Emma Stone is similarly great as love interest Gwen Stacy, and the two actors share a brilliant chemistry. Andrew Garfield is a near-perfect Spider-Man, managing to do that ‘cheerful working class dude who can’t cut a break’ schtick in a way never quite achieved by predecessor Tobey Maguire (too bleak) or successor Tom Holland (working class woes mean nothing if your best friend is a billionaire). The acting, for example, is difficult to fault. In between there’s a movie that’s amiable, and often enjoyable, but far too weakly put together to fully recommend. The story appears to straddle across the film rather than fill it: it picks up on a string of plot threads from 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man and finishes with a bunch of stuff left over for a sequel. The film has a beginning, a middle and an end, but they’re all just a little too unfocused and flabby. This is actually a difficult movie to describe in a sentence, because the majority of its 142 minutes are devoted to cross-film story arcs and subplots, without a lot of space left over from a strong narrative through-line. When an industrial accident transforms the shy engineer Max Dillon into the super-powered villain Electro, Parker has to stop him before he destroys all of New York.Īnd so on and so forth. In The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (released with the unnecessary subtitle Rise of Electro in Australia) Peter Parker continues to fight crime while vacillating over his relationship with Gwen Stacy and reuniting with his childhood friend Harry Osborn. Let’s jump back almost eight years to take a look at Garfield’s last turn as headliner. At the same time I worry that his fans forget why there never was an Amazing Spider-Man 3 in the first place. To an extent I understand the urge Garfield was great in the role of Peter Parker, and the second of his two Spider-Man features ended on a wide-open note. There has been a weird rise in Internet chatter lately from Spider-Man fans demanding that Sony – in addition to continuing their hugely successful films with Marvel Studios – jump back in time and commission a third Amazing Spider-Man movie starring Andrew Garfield.
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