THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2's Great Cast Can't Quite Overcome Its Tangled Web of a Script

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 Review:

- There's a lot of rage out there being directed towards THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2. On one level, I get it: the movie is, in many ways, emblematic of everything that is frustrating with the current blockbuster movie landscape. On one hand, you have the mighty Marvel Studios seemingly doing just about everything right. On the other hand, the other studios - especially when it comes to beloved Marvel characters - well, not so much. Everyone wants to see Spider-Man revert to Marvel Studios, star in the next Avengers movie, and just generally be in movies as awesome as, say, Captain America: The Winter Soldier. And then there's the other thing that Spider-Man 2 represents, which is an increasing frustration with empty-feeling blockbusters that seem to feel less like a coherent story and more like a collection of marketing-friendly moments. It's likely no coincidence that a lot of the recent big movies that felt the brunt of this type of criticism were written by the Kurtzman-Orci team. In the past, I've defended some of the movies that they've written. Star Trek: Into Darkness was one where, whatever failings the plot had, the crackerjack direction of JJ Abrams mostly made up for it. But THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 has some of Kurtzman and Orci's most glaring, most perplexing plot-holes yet. And when you combine those very noticeable logic-gaps with the perception that these films exist largely as a way to keep rights from reverting to Marvel ... a real dark cloud of cynicism begins to creep in.

With all that said, I enjoyed the movie. I like director Marc Webb a lot, and he really nails the look and feel of Spider-Man. The majority of the action scenes look fantastic, and the physical/visceral essence of Spider-Man is captured better than it's ever been. What's more, the cast is, again, excellent. I liked Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst in the original Sam Raimi trilogy, but I also always felt that there was something a little off about them. Maguire was always too dopey for me - he never seemed like the wise-crackin' Spider-Man of the comics and cartoons. But Andrew Garfield - to me, he's the definitive Peter Parker and the definitive Spider-Man. What the movie - and Garfield - get totally right is the way in which Garfield's Spider-Man does his superhero thing: swinging into battle with fluidity and grace, all the while kicking ass while never failing to accompany each strike with a well-timed quip. Spidey feels like Spidey. And Spidey - and Peter's - relationship with Emma Stone's Gwen Stacy is superb. Say what you want about this film, but you can't deny that the scenes between Garfield and Stone sparkle with a chemistry and likability that was never really there with Maguire and Dunst's Mary Jane Watson in the originals. Chalk it up to the real-life relationship between the two actors, sure. But I do think that you've got to give some credit to both the script and to Webb (who made his mark with the charming rom-com 500 Days of Summer) for the equally-charming banter and evolving relationship between the two leads. And there's the rub: aside from a couple of fun action scenes, what THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 does best, by a country mile, is the teen romance stuff.

But what's super-weird about the movie is that the Peter-Gwen scenes, as in the first film, feel pretty naturalistic - almost like something out of Webb's 500 Days - and yet, many other scenes in the film are seemingly from an entirely different movie. A superhero film from the dark days of the mid-90's, when Joel Schumaker gave us Batman villains that would make you laugh at their ridiculousness, if you weren't too busy cringing from their awfulness. Suffice it to say, the tonal shifts in this sequel come often and come hard. Relative to the first Amazing Spider-Man, it's sort of jarring. That whole film seemed to be going for a bit of a darker, edgier vibe than the Raimi trilogy. Here, the Peter-Gwen stuff, mostly, retains the tone of the first film. But the scenes introducing the new villains - in particular Jamie Foxx's over-the-top-to-the-extreme Electro - reminded me less of anything in the first ASM, and more of stuff I had semi-blocked out of my memory from the infamous likes of Batman Forever and Batman & Robin.

If there's one major disaster in THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2, it's Electro. And oddly, the character of Max Dillon starts out as sort of interesting, but soon completely devolves into a guy who just wants to destroy stuff and kill Spider-Man for no real reason. From the first moment we meet Max, something, to me, felt off. Foxx seemed to be playing him too broad, too cartoonish and silly for the movie that he's in. Still, the movie seemed to be going for something interesting by making Max a truly tragic villain - a well-meaning if slightly-strange guy who can't seem to catch a break. A low-level technician at OsCorp who is sort of a punching bag, the Spider-Man-obsessed sad-sack gets a life-changing shock when an on-the-job accident transforms him into the bright-blue, electricity-charged Electro. But as soon as Max makes the transition to supervillainy, he inexplicably seems to lose all traces of humanity. And Spider-Man, despite knowing Max's tragic origins, seems to have little regard for the once-amiable dude's well-being. Whatever potential Max had to be a very different sort of villain very quickly evaporates. In short order, he's just some low-rent Dr. Manhattan-looking antagonist who wants to fight.

The generic nature of Spider-Man's fights with Electro highlights another major oddity about the film in general: Peter Parker is sort of a jerk. It's not something that's there, overtly, in the script. But time and again, Peter doesn't seem to have much in the way of compassion. He promptly stops caring about Electro's tragic origins. And when his childhood friend, Harry Osborn, asks Peter to help him secure some of Spider-Man's blood - which Harry believes might be the key to curing the degenerative disease that's killing him - Peter flatly refuses. In reality, the problem is not so much with any obvious agenda on the movie's part to make Peter a jerk. It all stems back to the script's jumpiness. 1+1 doesn't equal 2 in this movie. Electro is a tragic villain, and then not. Harry finds out that his middle-aged dad is dying from a slow-burn degenerative disease, finds out that he has the same ailment, and then for some reason is sure that he has only a matter of weeks to live. Peter refuses to give Harry any of his Spider-enhanced blood, but as far as we can tell, there's no good reason why he wouldn't. Basically, Peter - as far as he knows - could save the life of his friend with a quick blood sample - but refuses for reasons that aren't quite clear to us. Only later does Peter actually find out that the radioactive spider that bit him, that made him Spider-Man, was genetically-engineered by Peter's scientist dad to work only on members of the Parker family. Unnecessary changes to the mythos aside, this is a clear case where clearly Plot Point A is coming to light after Plot Point B, when the reverse should have been true.

This is just one example (and you can find many exhaustive articles online calling out many more) of why THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 has, regrettably, one of the most poorly-structured plots of any recent big blockbuster movie I can think of. Countless plot points seem conspicuously omitted, only to resurface after the fact. Character motivations surface up out of thin air, making characters feel two-dimensional and silly.

Harry Osborn's transition to the Green Goblin is another example of this. In Raimi's original trilogy, Harry slowly but surely turned against Peter and Spider-Man. Here, Dane DeHaan's Harry is set up from his first scene as having a dark side. But he goes from merely dark and brooding to evil and murderous with the flip of a switch. The whole thing feels rushed. It's a shame because a.) DeHaan is a great actor and does gradual villainy well (see: Chronicle), and b.) Harry Osborn is by far the more compelling of the movie's two villains, but what could have been a gripping, movie-spanning turn to the dark side is instead a total rush-job. When Harry eventually becomes the spiky-haired, green-skinned, sharp-toothed, stark-raving-mad Goblin, it's sadly pretty laughable. Just as Electro is set up to be the tragic villain, only to become a generic criminal, so too does Harry go from multidimensional adversary to random rogue who just wants to blow stuff up and kill people. Strangely, the goofiness of the villains is only amplified by their costumes and character-design. As much as Spider-Man looks exactly right, the bad guys look like conceptual design-work gone very-wrong.

The movie seems to just give up on trying to tie any of this together thematically. Peter and Gwen's romantic storyline is completely separate from the story of the two villains. And the two villains' plotlines are also completely separate from each other - eventually coming together in the same way that a kid might mash two random action figures together - just because.  What this means is that when the big finale brings Peter, Gwen, Electro, and the Goblin together for the big final showdown, it all feels very random, and there's little emotional weight to it all. In a different Spider-Man movie, that could have been not-that-big-a-deal. But, without spoiling anything, THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 is *trying* for a big, huge, emotional moment in its final act. And that moment, which should have been absolutely devastating, is instead only marginally affecting. Why? Because it's so forced in the context of the story, and so removed tonally and plot-wise from anything that's come before.

Going back to Kurtzman and Orci, lack of structural integrity in their films has been the biggest knock against them for years. They tend to do well with the witty banter and they tend to have a knack for setting up imaginative set-piece sequences that translate well from page to screen. But for some reason, plot always takes a huge back seat. Now, historically, blockbuster action movies don't always have the tightest of plots - and there's many a big blockbuster that is ripe to be picked apart by those looking for logic gaps and plot holes. But THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 does feel particularly problematic. Maybe it's because the movie is so good in other ways, from the eye-popping visuals to the great chemistry between its leads. Maybe it's that the gaps here are ones so central not just to the plot, but to the core characterizations of the main players, that you can't just separate them out in your mind. I mean, look, in Star Trek: Into Darkness, it annoyed me that Spock only learns about the extent of Khan's evil through a Spock Prime-provided info-dump. But at least in that case, the structural laziness was solely an issue with the plotting, and didn't really affect characterization. Here, the issues are much more interconnected, and less easy to isolate. Peter not helping Harry by giving his blood isn't just a plot hole, but, like I said, it makes Peter look like an irrational jerk. Harry and Max's villainous meltdowns aren't just examples of bad plotting - their sudden transformations into uber-badguys completely undermines the characterization that had been used to establish who they were as people. It was only recently that Captain America: The Winter Soldier gave us a superhero film that smartly delivered a plot about a hero having to fight against his former best friend. In that film, the Cap vs. Winter Soldier conflict was not just the film's plot, but the center of its entire emotional core. Here, Harry vs. Peter is just a rushed set-piece. The emotional core that should be there - two lifelong best friends tragically having to fight to the death - is almost entirely absent.

At some point too, you can't just blame Kurtzman and Orci for this. As director, Marc Webb has to tie each scene together, and has to find that connective tissue, that emotional core, at the heart of his film. But because scenes feel randomly-assembled, and character motivations seem to come and go on a whim, all of the movie's big emotional beats hit only at the surface level. There are a lot of moments that feel like they are, perhaps, *supposed* to be emotionally resonant, but that simply feel cold and unaffecting. We know that Webb is capable of better. I'll still defend the first Amazing Spider-Man as a very solid, well-done superhero flick that was, overall, a lot more effective and affecting than its sequel. Now, the first film had a different set of writers (some of whom worked on Raimi's trilogy), and more leeway to breathe and just sort of establish this new take on Spider-Man. The second film seems to be boxed in by all kinds of studio pressure. I don't know the full-story, but this, again, feels like a throwback to the 90's when it was all about more=better. Two villains are better than one. Twelve subplots are better than three (and indeed, this film is overloaded with mostly-useless subplots - from Aunt May's training as a nurse to the secret history of Peter's dad and Norman Osborn). Ultimately, the film seems to be building to some vaguely-outlined Sinister Six movie that, again, feels less like a natural extension of the story, and more like a studio-mandated directorate to give Spiderman his own connected movie universe - just like what's happening over at Marvel Studios. There's really no solid narrative through-line that takes us from this film to Sinister Six. It's just "oh hey, remember those villains from this film? Well, there's a bunch more that we haven't shown you yet, and soon they may just decide to team up!" So you've got to wonder: did Kurtzman and Orci's tendency to place minimal importance on structure, combine with the studio's insistence that various stuff be unnaturally shoehorned into the film, to create a perfect storm of superhero schlock? Doesn't seem too far-fetched.

And yet ... the movie generates enough goodwill - through Peter and Gwen's charm, through the cool visuals, through the fantastic score, and through the odd individual scene that really works well - to help sort of cover-up all of the gaping holes. I mean, man, the movie's first big Spider-Man set-piece (following a slightly meh flashback opening to Peter's dad's final days), is pretty awesome. We see Spidey take on Paul Giamatti's low-rent criminal Rhino in a pretty glorious sequence that nails Spider-Man to a T (Giamatti is mostly wasted, but that's besides the point here). Everything I said before about Spider-Man feeling 100% spot-on in this film - from the look of the costume to the wise-cracks to the way he fights - is all there in this sequence. The scene is all Webb, and it's Webb at his best. I don't know if anyone has directed better Spider-Man action sequences, ever, and that's a credit to the director's talent and feel for the character.

For those moments where THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 so perfectly nails ol' web-head, I think that it is well-worth checking out, despite its flaws. Certain moments will bring a smile to the face of new and longtime Spidey fans alike. And for those who are able to tune out all the sound and fury of the villains and larger plot, what you're left with is a very charming and likable love story between two goofy-yet-lovable kids named Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy. At the same time, this is a long movie, and one that's jam-packed with characters and plot. And at some point, the plot holes and weird characterizations and goofiness of the villains begin to weigh down the movie. And ultimately, the weight causes the movie - held up by the flimsiest of structures - to collapse, and sink. This is a film that's heavy with plot, and the plot simply doesn't hold up - and what's more, it actively undermines the film's broader emotional and thematic intentions.

I think that this director and this cast are more than capable of giving us a classic Spider-Man movie. They already gave us a really solid one with the first film. But here, things begin to unravel a bit, and now I am slightly worried for the health of this franchise. This sequel certainly has its moments. Like I said, I enjoyed it, overall. But it's also a prime example of how a big franchise film can start to go off the rails, by worrying so much about being a big franchise film that it forgets the basics of good storytelling. The first ASM defied the odds and successfully re-booted Spider-Man. But hey, Spider-Man himself said it: with great power comes great responsibility. And filmmakers should have faith that if you prioritize first the responsibility to tell a good story, then good things will follow.

My Grade: B-

DJANGO UNCHAINED Delivers a Fistful of Awesome

DJANGO UNCHAINED Review:

- Thank you, Quentin Tarantino. Seriously. Thank you for creating original films based on original ideas - movies that both pay tribute to cinematic history and also boldly forge something new and never-before-seen. There's a reason why film geeks scramble to get a hold of new Tarantino scripts when they're completed - they're awesome, inspired pieces of original writing. And there's a reason why a new Tarantino film is always a true event for film fans - it's because we know we're getting something special, unique, genre-bending and boundary-pushing. DJANGO UNCHAINED is the latest from QT, and oh man, it is certifiably badass. In many ways, the movie is the perfect companion piece to his last film, Inglorious Basterds. That film was Jewish revenge-fantasy, juxtaposing World War II era catastrophe with fearless glam-rock rebirth. Django forges a similar path, juxtaposing the atrocities of American slavery in the pre-Civil War South with the rebirth and empowerment and new-found sense of swagger and self that came with hip-hop music over a century later. DJANGO is over-the-top, often very funny, and full of spaghetti western-meets-grindhouse style violence. It's got a pulpy style and QT's usual knack for dialogue-driven snap. The film didn't quite floor me in the same way that some of my favorite QT films have in the past, but I still sort of loved it all the same. DJANGO is one last injection of cinematic awesome in what has been, I think, a fine year for film.

At its core, DJANGO is Tarantino's take on the Spaghetti Western genre, popularized by the great Sergio Leone films like A Fistful of Dollars and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Tarantino has littered his films with Leone references and call-backs, but here, the entire film pays heavy tribute to Leone, even including a a few new pieces composed by the legendary Ennio Marricone (who did all of the iconic themes for Leone's films). The film also pays tribute to Sergio Corbucci, who's B-grade "Django" Westerns are the inspiration for and spiritual successors of this one. But of course, DJANGO also blends the conventions of the Spaghetti Western (including a lot of the iconic sorts of shots that Leone made famous) with the themes and tropes of Blaxploitation. This is a genre that Tarantino has certainly dabbled in a bit before, especially given that Blaxploitation films could often also be labeled what you might call "grindhouse." But DJANGO UNCHAINED places us in the Antebellum South, where we meet Django (the D is silent), played by Jamie Foxx, being led by chains through the woods alongside a group of fellow slaves. But Django's life of dehumanizing servitude takes a sudden turn when the slaves and their masters have a run in with German dentist-turned-bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz). King has taken up a bounty on the law-breaking Brittle Brothers, who have taken refuge - under assumed names - on a plantation, and is looking for a slave who can identify them. As it turns out, Django is Schultz's man. Schultz, however, detests slavery - he enters into a mutual agreement with Django in which the now-freed slave can share in the profits of he and Schultz's bounty-hunting. Django agrees to partner up with Schultz on one condition - that eventually, the Doctor will help him to find and free his wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), who was long ago forcefully separated from her husband, and made a slave at the plantation owned by the vile and violent Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio).

The film is anchored by four incredible performances. One - Jamie Foxx as Django. Foxx faced an enormous challenge in this film - starting out as a slave who had been beaten and humiliated into submission and servitude, and slowly but surely becoming a full man - and not just a man, but a badass gunslinger not to be $&%#'ed with. Foxx does a masterful job here. Oftentimes, Django must act one way in the service of he and King's schemes, while his eyes ever so slightly betray the fact that it's all an act. For example, when King and Django go to meet Candie, Django poses as a black slave trader - the lowest of the low. Django must grapple with how far to "get into character," and the way Foxx plays it is just right. Two - Christoph Waltz is phenomenal as Dr. King Schultz. King is a fascinating character - a man who's as sharp a talker as he is a shooter. He's also a true outsider in the American South - a German who is at once repulsed by the slavery, violence, and moral bankruptcy of America but one who also has thrived and profited from that environment. Waltz makes King's character arc fascinating in its own right - perhaps even more so than Django's. But mostly, Waltz is just awesome as hell. His theatricality and flair matched with Tarantino's stylized dialogue is, again, a match made in movie heaven. Three - Leonardo DiCaprio as Calvin Candie. Candie doesn't enter into the picture until midway through the film, but he is, immediately, a scene-stealer. Suffice it to say, I've never seen DiCaprio play a role like this before - an over-the-top villain who mixes Southern Hospitality with sadistic bloodlust and an endless supply of racist hate. DiCaprio, surprisingly, makes Candie a ball of pent-up rage and madness, and that barely-suppressed craziness helps make the Candie-centric scenes spill over with tension. Four - Samuel L. Jackson as Stephen, Candie's top slave and head-of-household. Wow - this is one of Jackson's best-ever performances, and one where he's not coasting on playing Sam Jackson, but a really fascinating character that is far-removed from the actor's typical persona (one which has, in many ways, been shaped by his roles in Tarantino's films). Stephen is in many ways the biggest badguy in the film - representing a slave who has a false sense of power due to his high position in the plantation, and who has been brainwashed into having ultimate loyalty to Candie and his family. Even as Django fights to be "unchained," Stephen fights for the status quo. He is the slave just strong-willed and independent-minded enough to be a useful lieutenant for Candie, but never so strong-willed as to ever question the will of his master. Of course, Stephen is a dark character, but Sam Jackson also makes him fun as hell - his verbal exchanges with Django are brilliantly funny.

The great casting doesn't end there. So many brilliant actors turn up in smaller roles that it's hard to keep track. A few that I'll mention are Don Johnson as plantation owner Big Daddy, Walton Goggins as Candie's muscle Billy Crash, M.C. Gainey - who I love from Lost and Justified - as Big John Brittle, and even Jonah Hill, who has a cameo in a hilarious scene involving a proto version of the KKK. Tarantino himself actually cameos as well, in an explosively oddball scene towards the end of the movie. I'll also give special mention to Kerry Washington, who does a fantastic job as Broomhilda Von Shaft (purportedly, an ancestor of John Shaft (!!!), according to QT). It would have been interesting had Washington played a larger role, but this is, ultimately, Django's story, and she is his princess that needs saving from horrible circumstances. But Washington infuses Broomhilda with unspoken emotion and trepidation, and it makes her eventual reunion with her husband that much sweeter.

DJANGO has a lot of the slow-build, dialogue-heavy scenes that we've come to expect from Tarantino. But as in Inglorious Basterds, they prove so well-done that it's hard to find much fault in them. Some sequences feel ever-so-slightly overlong though, and you wonder about the effect that not having the late Sally Menke on editing duties may have had. Menke, who edited all of QT's previous films, sadly passed away before DJANGO was filmed, and I do think there's a slight lack of tightness in some of the scenes as compared to films like Kill Bill and Basterds. Overall, it felt to me like parts of the film looked a little drab - lacking some of the visual richness of the Leone movies that QT was referencing. I usually leave a Tarantino film with several iconic images emblazoned in my memory - I'd say that happened less so than usual with this one. However, the movie jolts to electrifying life in a couple of key instances. One is when Tarantino utilizes flashbacks to Django and Broomhilda's past, presented in a rough, 70's grindhouse-esque style that emphasized the exploitative nature of the scenes. These, to me, were some of the most powerful scenes in the film. The other scenes that truly pop are the action scenes, which are just vintage Tarantino. The director has always had a knack for chaotic action scenes filled with one "holy $#@%!" moment after another in rapid-fire succession. And, damn, when business picks up in DJANGO UNCHAINED, it really picks up. Some of the big shoot-out scenes are just balls-to-the-wall insane.

I think the thematic point that a lot of people will want to discuss about the film is its sense of morality. For better or for worse, it's hard at this point to watch the movie completely in a vacuum, and not think, at least a little, about some of the recent shootings that have occurred across the country. What's interesting is that, despite all of the movie's over-the-top violence and pulpy nature, it actually does meditate a bit on the morality of violence. In fact, Dr. King's entire arc is sort of an exploration of this in its own, slightly-twisted way. As a bounty hunter, King kills only for money, never really making moral judgements about what he does except to justify it: killing these men is okay, because they are criminals, and he's within his legal boundaries. But at some point, King stops doing only what is profitable, and starts thinking more about what is right. Granted, even doing what is right involves gunning down bad guys - but that's another theme of the film. Django also paints a picture of an Antebellum South so brainwashed by slave culture that only a storm of bullets and hellfire could wake it up. In reality, that wake-up call was the bloodshed of the Civil War. But in Tarantino's pulp-fiction movieverse, Django was the precursor - the first shot of the Civil War came when he picked up a gun and began to turn the tables on the men who'd long abused and persecuted him and his people. This is, in many ways, a parallel to the revenge-scheme in Inglorious Basterds - over-the-top and uber-violent, but righteous in the way that it shows these characters not just fighting for themselves, but literally pushing against history. All of the violence, well, it begets violence. And Tarantino is a master at juxtaposing the empowerment of the modern minority with the delusional entitlement of the historical oppressor. Basically, the movie is a satisfying, cathartic, retroactive "#%$& you!" to the slave-owners, oppressors, and racists of the pre-Civil War South.

So like I said, thank you Quentin Tarantino. Although DJANGO UNCHAINED didn't quite register for me as the pure cinematic dynamite of your very best work, it had some of the year's most memorable performances and moments, and it was a true original. Funny, bloody, and badass to the core, this is vintage QT, and we as film fans are all better for having his movies, a defiant alternative to so much of the blandness that is out there. My main question now is ... what's next?

My Grade: A-