Spideython: The Amazing Spider-Man 2

Ah, what the Christ.

Well, my Spideython is done, I've done all five Spider-Man movies in five days and I feel like I'm prepared for Homecoming. But man, what a shitty note to end a marathon on. At least with my Bond and MCU marathons I felt some sort of excitement for the next film, but this...this movie nearly ruined Spider-Man for me.

I first saw The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in 2014 on Mother's Day. It had been out for a few weeks by then, and my mom met me at the movie theater where I worked, and I noticed a lot of people had come through to see it by that point, so I took a gamble and took my mom to see it. This was way before I took movies as seriously as I do now. When I got out of that movie, I felt like I had to apologize to my mom for making her sit through that...trainwreck.

It's hard to try and pinpoint where things went wrong with TASM2, so hard that I'm not even going to try because it's a waste of energy. This movie happened, and nearly killed the idea of Spider-Man movies until Marvel finally managed to cut a deal with Sony. And if you're so lucky to have never seen this movie, I'm going to try and break down what's wrong with it the best way I can.

First up, the story, as usual. This is the most disjointed, miswrote, and just downright awful story line I've seen in a superhero flick in a long time. There are too many characters in this movie with too many opposing paths, and none of it really feels like it joins together. For instance, there's a huge subplot of this movie that takes about a half an hour out where Peter goes forward with trying to find what happened to his parents. You feel like it will lead up to some sort of huge payoff, but it does nothing, nothing at all. There was a deleted scene where his father shows up, but that was cut, leaving it feeling out of place completely. That's just one example of why this shit doesn't work.

Second up, casting. Now I usually don't bitch much about casting in movies because usually most actors manage to make their characters work for them. But I've already said that the Amazing cast isn't that great in the first place, and it doesn't get any better, in fact, all the new characters are worse. Let me be the first to say that Dane DeHaan is TERRIBLE in this movie. He's monotone as fuck and just seems so damn slimy. Our two other villains, Jamie Foxx and Paul Giamatti, are criminally underused and given two characters that are almost laughable. Even Felicity Jones managed to get roped into this mess...she had potential but of course it all was wiped away.

And finally, everything technical, everything that brings the movie together, is poorly done. The editing is shit, the CGI on Electro is laughably bad, it all just doesn't work. I don't know what the hell happened behind the scenes, it's almost like the editors and the directors never met, and both were setting out to make a completely different movie. Oh lord, it's a total fucking mess.

That's what this movie is, outside of a few key scenes, it's a total fucking mess. I'll give it 3.9/10, and that's being generous. To this day, I still feel dirty watching this because I know just how much it fucked everything up, and god bless Marvel for gaining a backbone and bringing Spidey back to justice. See you on Sunday for my Homecoming review.