An Climax That Makes You Forget the Rest of the Film

Rating: 7/10 (30 April 2014)

"The Amazing Spider-Man 2" is a very long movie, lasting for two hours and a half. But as you go out of the theater, you will only remember and talk about one thing -- an ending that is so numbing that it just about overshadows everything else that happens in the film. But that is getting ahead of me.
In this sequel of the Mark Webb reboot of Spider-Man with Andrew Garfield as the web-slinger, we follow the story of Peter and Gwen (Emma Stone) as they graduate from college and their relationship gets complicated by Peter's sideline as Spider-Man. Meanwhile, a nerdy engineer in Oscorp, Max Dillon (Jamie Foxx), gains super electrical powers when he falls into a tank of electric eels, later terrorizing the city as glowing blue Electro.
Peter finally learns the truth about his dad's (Dougray Scott) disappearance via a recorded message he found in an abandoned station. Harry Osborne (Dane DeHaan) returns to take over Oscorp when his father died, and reconnects with his old friend Peter. But as he desperately seeks out a cure for a deadly familial disease he has inherited from his father, he winds up as the Green Goblin. After all of that, we still get to see the Rhino terrorize the city before the film ends.
The chick-flick parts of the film really work out very well, thanks to the excellent screen chemistry between Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone. They had so many zippy one-liners between it was fun to watch.
The action parts were excellent with all the wondrous computer-generated special effects about Spider-Man's fancy web-swinging skills, to Electro's dazzling pyrotechnics which take up most of the film. DeHaan's Green Goblin appearance was just in a single short fight sequence towards the end. And Paul Giamatti's turn as the mechanized Rhino was only a glorified cameo at best in the epilogue.
The whole angle about Peter's dad Richard, while undoubtedly of great dramatic importance, I felt was out of place in the whole film in terms of story-telling, unnecessarily making the film feel too long and over- stuffed. Whatever Peter found out about his dad did not seem to matter at all when it comes to the events in this film.
Overall though, I felt that while this was a good film, it just tried to tell a lot of stories, getting carried away with too many ongoing story lines. Ultimately, it was buoyed up by the wonderful central performances of Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone as Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy, which sets it apart as more than just a mere CG- effects- extravaganza. Their effective portrayals of these two lovers gave this film a lot of depth and heart.