Good, but squandered.

Rating: 7/10 (6 May 2014)

I thought the film was good, but sadly, had a lot of it's potential squandered. The ingredients it has are great, Garfield as Peter, Stone as Gwen, etc, but due to a messy script (which was written by multiple people), it gets a lot of it's potential wasted. The main problem I had was that the romance didn't need to be all "are we together or not?", that's a problem Raimi's movies had. Peter and Gwen should have just stayed together throughout. Another problem was that the whole conspiracy with Peter's parents should have been dealt with in the first film. It's great that they're making Peter's parents actually matter and not be just being dead for the sake of making Peter an orphan like in the comics, but it's getting ridiculous at this point. God, and don't even get me started on the advertising campaign.
That said, despite having big cons, it also has bigger pros, and what it does do good (like Gwen's death for example), it does great. Had those three previous points been improved, along with a few more nitpicky things (walking Smythe? Male Kafka?) then I'd probably give the film a higher rating. I just hope that 3 improves upon this film. I want this series to succeed, and I have no doubt in my mind that Webb and everyone else on board have the potential to make it better than Raimi's series, but sadly, despite having the right ingredients, this cake is being baked by someone (SONY) with dirty hands. I'm really starting to wish that MARVEL had gotten the film rights to Spider-man. Looking at Winter Soldier, I can only muse over what could have been.