"That's good. That's like a 40-degree day. Ain't nobody got nothing to
say about a 40-degree day. Fifty. Bring a smile to your face. Sixty,
shit, ni**as is damn near barbecuing on that motherfucker. Go down to
20, ni**as get their bitch on. Get their blood complaining. But forty?
Nobody give a fuck about 40. Nobody remember 40, and y'all ni**as is
giving me way too many 40-degree days! What the fuck?"
--Stringer Bell, "The Wire"
May's warm climates might be descending upon us, but make no mistake. Theaters showing "The Amazing Spider-Man 2" stand at a firm 40 degrees.
Coldly calculated to neither delight nor disgust, this second installment in director Marc Webb's Spidey series hits a drive straight down the middle. You can almost feel the cynical pencil strokes of Sony executives checking off target audiences to appeal to, requisite superhero beats to hit, and brief references to other Spider-Man characters/villains as they blatantly begin to build their own world.
"The Amazing Spider-Man 2" doesn't kick start the summer movie season as much as it politely knocks on the door.
And yet there's such goofy, amiable charm to this thing, a mix of sound, fury, and punchiness that can't entirely be denied, no matter how hard you try. It's like the high school jock who turns out to be a pretty nice guy. You want to hate him. He's everything you aren't. But then he smiles at you and remembers your name, and oh well, you'll let him cut in front of you in the cafeteria one more time.
Webb and his series' biggest hurdle, one they haven't quite surmounted yet, is the simple question of "Why?" Why reboot the character when Sam Raimi's and Tobey Maguire's trilogy barely stopped twitching in the ground? OK - the obvious hard truth is money. But lets for a moment pretend we live in a world where summer tentpoles aren't entirely business transactions and move on. When Webb's first "Amazing Spider-Man" hit in 2012, it had so much going for it, you were willing to forgive what it lacked. It was sunny. It was funny in an easygoing way. And its secret weapon hidden in plain sight, the natural chemistry between stars Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone.
Not exactly stuff to reinvent the wheel. But stuff to lay the foundation.
Now here we are, the first sequel. Heavy lifting's done, and it's time to put up or shut up. Anticipation is high, especially when you recall the delirious dazzlements Raimi brought to his "Spider-Man 2" when his shackles were off and he could run free. The problem with Webb's movie isn't that it regresses. It's that it stalls. It doesn't want to risk whatever minor successes it already accomplished in the first one.
This doesn't make it a bad movie, per se. Just an irritatingly safe one. Individual moments do pop, such as a dizzying opening action sequence where Spider-Man chases down a van carrying stolen plutonium through the streets of New York. But nothing matching such sublime moments from Raimi's part 2 as Peter Parker skipping to the tune of "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head" or Spider-Man, mask removed, stopping a runaway subway car as it nearly careens off the track.
To illustrate what makes "The Amazing Spider-Man 2" so frustrating, lets return to that aforementioned opening sequence, which is so pitch-perfect, you want to give yourself to the movie from then on. Webb's confident staging of action and Peter Parker's sheer joy in being Spider-Man, offering wiseass banter as he taunts the bad guys, converge in a way that feels perfectly suited to what Webb's vision for the series seems to be - light-on-its-feet charm embodying how cool it would be to be young and have superpowers.
Indeed this sequence is the epitome of Webb's abilities, and if it's a tone in search of a purpose, what follows is a purpose in search of a movie. Seeing what Webb is capable of makes it all the more sad to see him handcuffed from then on. His screenwriters, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci cowrote, among other things, last summer's "Star Trek Into Darkness," and for all that movie's detractors, one thing you can not accuse it of is playing it safe. Ballsy and at times downright weird, it represented at least a new way to build on the goodwill established in a successful franchise reboot. "The Amazing Spider-Man 2" takes no such risks, not when there's checks to cash. Orci, Kurtzman, and Webb (along with writer Jeff Pinkner) tell less of a story and more of a series of events. Electro (played by Jamie Foxx) never registers as a villain, instead representing but one more obstacle in Peter Parker's quest to the end credits. Moments don't lead to moments and dialogue doesn't lead to dialogue; instead coincidences lead to other coincidences. This happened because this needs to happen because this needs to happen because this is the studio's plan for their franchise.
It's as if everyone lost their shooting script and instead worked with a third draft outline completed with the aid of a teacher from a screenwriting seminar.
And yet here we are - for all the mechanical faults in "The Amazing Spider-Man 2," it's a movie I enjoyed both in spite of what it is and because of what it is. Lets face facts. Superhero movies are an immovable force, made for gazillions of dollars because they make gazillions of dollars back. Even the most reputable reviewer is reduced to a figure shaking his fist at the rain.
If you want to see the movie, you likely will. I can't stop what's coming. All I can do is throw my hands in the air and ask if my life is ultimately worse for having seen it. "The Amazing Spider-Man 2" is a movie built in a lab, basically one big commercial for upcoming movies set in the Spider-Man universe. Yet the overall giddiness and enthusiasm just barely makes me not regret my time spent.
"The Amazing Spider-Man 2" is grammatically correct. The "Amazing" Spider-Man 2 is more appropriate. But no need to get sarcastic.
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