What makes Spider-Man fundamentally engaging and enjoyable
is his relatable humanity. Peter Parker is just a normal young guy with real
problems with family, school, girls, and employment. That provides a
ground-level rooting interest that’s a more direct emotional appeal in all his
action sequences than in all the boring climactic near-apocalyptic scenarios
that pervade the superhero genre. That’s what I found most charming about The Amazing Spider-Man. With Andrew
Garfield the reboot’s filmmakers found, like Sam Raimi found in Tobey Maguire for their superior films, a
likable guy. Even if Peter didn’t always do the right thing,
you knew the decisions pile up and weigh on him without getting in the way
of the high-flying fun of being Spider-Man. What was most refreshing about that
retelling of Spidey’s origin story was its relatively self-contained narrative.
It didn’t seem to be spending too much of its time teasing future installments
or leaving storylines conspicuously hanging at loose ends like so many
superhero movies do these days. It simply found good performers in a narrative
that had a beginning, middle, and end.
But when it comes to The
Amazing Spider-Man 2, the charm of a complete story has been entirely
thrown out. It consists of 142 minutes of scenes – some better than others –
that never cohere. The whole production exists for the moment, chasing a
this-happens-then-this-happens high where everything is pitched at a consistent
level of spectacle and import. I thought of Ebert’s criticism of Michael Bay’s Armageddon as a feature-length trailer.
The problem is, this Spider-Man isn’t
just cut together like its own highlights. It’s cut together like a teaser for
its own sequel. It’s all color, noise, and shapeless plot, stuffed full of
subplots and character introductions foreshadowing and previewing where the studio
would like to take this franchise in the future. As a result, the movie plays
out busily with much happening, but little impact. There’s no clear
through-line. Narrative, character, theme, and style exist in a haze,
constantly threatening to take shape, but never getting there.
To even briefly summarize the plot seems a losing
proposition. Instead I’ll describe some of the variables bouncing around. Peter
(Garfield) is on-again-off-again with the lovable Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone, continuing her appealing performance from the first movie). He’s
also trying to hide his superhero identity from sweet Aunt May (Sally Field).
Meanwhile, the heir to the CEO throne of the omnipresent and obviously menacing
Oscorp Industries, Harry Osborne (Dane DeHaan), skulks about looking to cure
his mysterious hereditary ailment. A dweeby and unjustly ignored scientist (Jamie
Foxx) gets electrocuted and then falls into a tank of genetically altered eels,
an experience that leaves him blue, translucent, able to manipulate energy, and
has rattled his brain in a way that leads him to decide he’s a supervillain and
take the name Electro. He must know he’s in a superhero movie. The rest of the movie
is filled with bit parts for the likes of Paul Giamatti, B.J. Novak, Felicity
Jones, and Sarah Gadon, all clearly sitting around hoping they get to play more
important roles in a future installment.
Director Marc Webb, with cinematographer Dan Mindel, shoots
it all clearly and colorfully, juggling the plotlines as best he can. It’s all
broad and comic-booky, with cartoony fluidity to the bright special effects and
shots of action that twist gymnastically around Spidey in sometimes-exciting
ways. But it is when Webb gets the chance to narrow in on the human relationships
that the movie works best. The scenes are not particularly well written, but Garfield
and Stone continue to have nice chemistry and manage to have a believable
romantic spark as they juggle their lives individually and together. He’s a
freelance photographer and Spider-Man.
She’s an Oscorp intern and wants to
go to Oxford in the fall. The question of what their future looks like, and
whether they’re a couple beyond the present, is treated with some gravity. It
works only because the performances are convincing.
Garfield is enjoying himself, creating a Peter Parker who is
having so much fun being Spider-Man, swinging down New York City skyscrapers
and wisecracking with bad guys, that darker shadings of grief and mystery
almost don’t have room to stretch out comfortably. Stone, for her part, is even
better. Not just a prop or an object to be rescued, she holds her own. Smart,
she helps think Spidey’s way out of a number of predicaments, and is her own
independent-minded person. It’s a shame that she has to reenact one of the
source material’s most famous plot developments, a decision that turns her into
yet another female character we’re only supposed to care about because of how
what happens to her makes the male lead feel.
But it’s not just her. Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci’s
screenplay makes the wrong moves by having every character and event become
simply an overtly reverential and referential signpost on the way to the next
spectacle, moving the pieces and gears into place for the next installment
instead of becoming a wholly satisfying story of its own. (That Kurtzman/Orci
scripts have sometimes made this a bad habit is not encouraging. I went into
the film unaware of its writers and when their credit appeared I groaned and
thought “makes sense.”) If I’m being charitable, the movie is an accidental
post-narrative experiment. If I’m not being charitable, it’s desperately laying
track just ahead of a franchise barreling down a route-in-progress. Either way,
the flop sweat starts to show. It leads to a wobbly tone and confused plot.
Take Jamie Foxx for example. He’s delivering an amused big,
campy performance that appears to belong in a different movie. Electro is a
jumble of shifting personalities, goofy jealousies, and legitimate complaints, not
to mention some serious-minded hints of metaphoric marginalization that remain
largely inactive, all mixed into one convincingly weird persona. His scenes
rise to match his nutty intensity and scattered evolution. I thoroughly enjoyed
his scene opposite the exquisitely named Dr. Ashley Kafka (Marton Csokas), a
man with a thick German accent who captures Electro in an Oscorp-funded insane
asylum’s contraption that looks like a rubber body suit welded into a giant
circuit board suspended over a hot tub. (Why would such a thing even exist
other than to accommodate the plot of a superhero movie?) It’s a scene that
feels one or two notches away from pure comedy.
But it is hard to square that tone with what we see
elsewhere. We get straining emotional scenes of Dane DeHaan brooding with intensity
in a heightened sickly torment that nearly breaks past the quick and dirty
token characterization given to him. There is light relationship comedy,
intimations of fatherly secrets for Spidey and Osborne alike, an opening
phony-baloney plane crash flashback, a concluding manipulative
little-kid-in-danger scene, a perilous blackout, a couple of winking references
to the sadly still-unseen J. Jonah Jameson (the best of all Spider-Man supporting characters), and a
funeral. It’s a sequel that does so much, it ends up feeling like nothing at
all. I didn’t exactly have a bad time, but its diverting qualities are fleeting
and its frustrations linger.
No comments:
Post a Comment