"The Amazing Spider-Man 2"

After a highly entertaining and auspicious first installment that delved deeper into building Peter Parker’s background and universe, Marc Webb delivers a Frankenstein’s Monster of a film whose production and post-production troubles are as visible and unpleasant to look at as the scars of a botched surgical operation. It is obvious that greedy Sony executives seized control of the film and had it heavily tweaked in order to open possibilities of an expanded cinematic universe the same way Marvel films do, making this regrettable mess another symptom of their business model’s poisonous influence on Hollywood filmmaking.

Oh to be sure, there have always been films harmed by their executives’ hands-on management, but rarely has it been so blatant and widespread than nowadays and rarely has a film become so bloated and incoherent as a result. Plot threads are woven and tangled together with little regard towards pacing or homogeneity; characters are abruptly introduced, forgotten then brought up again without having had time to justify their existence; the haste and unevenness of the film’s pacing and editing severely damage both the characters’ capacity to breathe on their own and that of their actors to bring them to life. Although Jamie Foxx, Emma Stone and Sally Field come out fairly well, Andrew Garfield and Dane DeHaan’s uneven performances give the same impression as most of the film does – that they have been pieced together from two different films crammed into one. Garfield seems to be in a constant struggle to find the right tone for the right persona in the right scene and DeHaan spends the first half of the film sounding like a stoner trying to do a Patrick Bateman impression only to slowly improve as Harry Osborn’s descent into despair and evil progresses – however unconvincingly put together that descent may be.

Perhaps the core of the film’s problems can find its summary in the film’s opening and closing scenes in which Spider-Man fights Paul Giamatti’s Rhino: Everything about them, from their staging to their editing, marks them as an advertisement for spin-offs and sequels, rather than an invitation towards the possibility of such things existing. Paul Giamatti’s embarrassing performance in particular recalls that of live-action actors playing the roles of cartoon villains from tie-in toy commercials. Yet beneath the rubble left by the narrative chaos, hums a faint sound that could be that of a good, salvageable film. Perhaps it might one day surface in the form of a Director’s Cut DVD/Blu-Ray that could fill in the gaps, extend certain scenes and replace weak takes by better ones. But I won’t hold my breath.