Movie Breakdown: The Amazing Spider-Man 2

People are doing traditional-style reviews all over the web, so we decided to try something different.  In each “breakdown” we’ll take a look at what a film’s marketing lead us to believe, how the movie actually played, and then what we learned from it all.  Read on!

The Impression:

You know what Peter Parker loves about being Spider-Man?  Everything.

The Reality:

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is a film that almost had me.  As the credits began to roll I was excited about what I had seen.  Then I drove home, and as my brain began to crawl through the movie, I realized that it wasn’t much more than an okay entry.  I love the on-screen chemistry between Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone, director Marc Webb does a stellar job of making the action scenes fun to watch, and the film does do what The Amazing Spider-Man couldn’t seem to, which is not feel like a totally useless rehash of Sam Raimi’s trilogy.  Unfortunately, there’s just a lot of things that don’t work.  Dane DeHaan’s performance as Harry Osborn is really uneven, the soundtrack is terrible, all of the villains are overly cartoonish, and the end of the movie seems to go on for an eternity so that the next however many Spider-Man adventures can be setup. In other words, it’s a movie that passes the eyeball test, but it doesn’t have much else to offer once you to start to dig into it.  Matinee it, if anything.

The Lesson:

Getting something sort of right is better than getting it entirely wrong.  I guess.