The Amazing Spider-Man 2 review: Too many sub-plots slow it

By Nikhil Subramaniam

There’s a point at around the halfway mark in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 where the movie just seems to slow down to a crawl, with long beats in between the dialogues. We are watching a long conversation in Peter Parker’s (Andrew Garfield) room. It’s a very telling moment, because there’s rarely a minute to breathe otherwise in the longest Spiderman caper ever.

The Spiderman reboot’s second installment is anything but boring and you will certainly not regret having seen it. There’s plenty of action to keep you hooked, and for once Spiderman is the funny superhero that the people of NYC love. Despite all that, though, it’s entangled in a web of myriad subplots; they seem to intertwine at will, without any allegiance to an overarching plot.

In the sequel, Peter Parker is about to be a high school graduate, but is slightly delayed for the ceremony because a truck full of goons has made off with a truck full of plutonium. Naturally, this could lead to all sorts of problems, which means Spiderman has to sashay down between the sky rises of New York City  to save the day. He is, of course successful, and for the first time in a long time, we see a funny side to Spiderman that’s been a hallmark of the comic canon, but sadly missing or ignored in the celluloid adaptations.

Spiderman is as much about a boy growing up and dealing with ‘life’ as it is about heroes fighting villains (and there’s a whole lot of that). So while Parker is fighting goons, Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) is delivering her valedictorian speech, about growing up and sacrificing things to do what you believe is right. The speech is intercut with scenes where Spiderman is fighting the plutonium-thieving bad guys, so it seems apt and sweet for the moment, only to take a much darker turn later on in the movie.

Any superhero movie is only as good as the bad guys. In this case, we have Jamie Foxx, who plays Max Dillon aka Electro. Before he becomes a walking battery, Dillon is just a regular guy with some attachment issues. One meeting with Spiderman and he starts believing they are best of friends, so naturally he’s bitter when Spidey seemingly tries to get him shot after he turns into Electro.

Backing up Electro is the Green Goblin or Harry Osborne, played with aplomb by Dane DeHaan. He is easily the most menacing of the three main villains.

Parker’s estranged childhood friend Osborne inherits the notorious Oscorp after his father’s death due to a hereditary disease. In his quest to not fall prey to the same illness, Osborne ends up burning bridges with Parker and scheming with Electro for some hybrid human-spider blood. Out of all the characters, Osborne seems the most earnest and also has the most villainous hair. His interactions with Parker are some of the most poignant scenes in the film and give us an insight into the boy inside Parker that no other character delivers, not even Stacy.

The third villain, in both the pecking order and in difficulty of defeating, is Aleksei Sytsevich aka Rhino, played by Paul Giamatti. He’s the man who tried to make off with the plutonium at the very beginning and returns in the end as a heavily armed robotic rhinoceros. This is in an inexplicably wasted role on a good actor.

Parker’s chemistry with Stacy is unquestionable, and they are both dealing with commitment issues, loss and transition. This should have been the transformative part of the movie, where Parker fully embraces his double life. Instead it leaves us not caring about their togetherness, and wishing that there were more scenes with him and Osborne instead.

Another subplot that falls flat is Parker’s attempts at reconciling with the loss of his parents. The sub-plot of Parker trying to figure out what secrets his father left behind seemed needlessly hyped up and didn’t even have that big an impact on the storyline, except to show us that Spiderman cannot help his friend even if he wanted to. If anything, the subplot felt like a MacGuffin, designed to fool the audience into following the wrong thread.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2’s biggest pitfall is that there are too many subplots going on and too many characters introduced. It’s all packed in tightly, which would have been great, if there was a semblance of cohesion. Between Spidey’s witty retorts, the breathtaking jumps, the funny sparring, and all that shiny electricity flying around, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 seems a little overdressed and stuffy. It leaves us hoping the next one will have a bit more polish and less flab.