The writers wasted this movie's potential

Rating: 4/10 (25 April 2014)

I hardly ever review movies here, but I had to on this one. It just bothered me too much that there was so much wasted talent in this movie.
I thought all the actors did their best with what they had, except maybe DeHaan. I compare this movie only to the previous series (from Sam Rami), of which I'm not a fan.
Garfield was actually a little bit better than Maguire as Spiderman. Apparently, he's closer to the comic book personality. For the ones who thought he was unlikable, remember he's a teenager that just graduated High School; he thinks he's God. He's reckless and an a-hole, just as u would expect from a teenager with actual superpowers.
The villains, on the other hand... sucked. There was no development for them whatsoever. Rhino appears at the beginning and the end, serving no apparent purpose to the main plot other than to say that Spidey is fighting crime. The same could have been done with a regular bank robbery or something.
Electro was not just unrealistically lonesome ("forever alone?"), but he didn't seem to have any good reasons to really hate Spiderman the way he did. The transition from an innocent good guy who's been screwed hard by people to a hateful villain can be called forced or non-existent. He didn't even seem to have any motivations for anything, really. He just sort of... did stuff. If he was the smart guy he was supposed to be, he should have been trying to come up with some sort of plan for revenge against his real enemies: Oscorp. I optimistically thought at times that they wanted to base him on those people that go on random shooting sprees all over the US, but even that didn't happen (if that's what they tried, they failed). Instead, he was more like Schwarzenegger's Mr Freeze, and not just aesthetically.
Then, just as Electro was killed, the Green Goblin appears for no apparent reason other than to mess with Spidey. The portrayal of Harry Osbourne was angry and creepy from the beginning, which makes him an obvious villain (don't know if this was on purpose, it could be blamed on the actor). Contrast that with James Franco's Osbourne, which was actually shown as Peter's friend, and makes you feel bad that they had to fight each other. Or with DaFoe's character, which also keeps you guessing, and feeling uneasy when he dies. I will concede that the conversion of Harry into the Green Goblin was more convincing in TAS2 than in the previous series, as it's shown as his search for a cure to his genetic disease, rather than some convenient accident. Still, the problematic relationship that should be there didn't take hold at all. This character should have been either the main villain in the movie, or just preparing to be on the next, without ever actually fighting the hero. If his purpose here was just to get Gwen to die, she should have died in the fight against Electro. His presence in the last 20 mins of the film seems forced.
Overall, a great waste of perfectly good actors and visual effects due to general incoherence in the story.