7 Reasons "The Amazing Spider-Man 2" is the Best Spider-Man Yet
My, the rebooted Marc Webb "Amazing Spider-Man" series is quite the polarizing couple of flicks. Many fans bash the series at every turn, criticizing every aspect of the films. Some fans bemoan the occasional hoakiness of the series while others are merely rooting for Spider-Man to fail in hopes that Sony will sour on the property and hand it back to Marvel Studios so the wall crawler can presumably take a place aside the Avengers. (BTW, you're dreaming. That's not going to happen. Like ever.) While there are some admittedly corny aspects to Webb's version of the web slinger and the films are far from perfect, the man still has created a richer Spideyverse with a superior Peter Parker, a better overall story and amped-up action and emotion. In fact, I'm going farther than that and saying "The Amazing Spider-Man 2" is the best of the five Spider-Man films. Here are my seven reasons why. (Also WARNING: Here there be SPOILERS): Don't agree? Sound off in the comments!
Andrew Garfield
The ultimate Spider-Man, bar none. All respect to Tobey Maguire, but as the folks at Honest Trailers mentioned in their takedown of the Raimi series, he looks like a puppy and has the voice of an even more non-threatening puppy. Garfield has presence, a sense of awkwardness and total believability as both an introverted loner and a brash, cocky superhero. Garfield throws himself into Peter Parker, and it shows.
Emma Stone
Sure, she's impossibly adorable and plays the sexy/nerdy dream girl to perfection. As Gwen Stacy, she's a mirror image of Peter Parker who both comforts and completely disarms him. She and Garfield have electric chemistry and fit together like peanut butter and jelly. In short, she's leagues better than Kirsten Dunst ever was.
The Raimi films aren't as great as you remember
Yeah, go back and watch them again. They're poorly edited, hokey and far too reliant upon Raimi's familiar tropes (like making Peter Parker into an emo, woman-beating beatnik). We kind of missed out on a lot of the flaws of "Spider-Man" and "Spider-Man 2" because we were so taken by what was good that we glossed over cornball moments, poor acting and overall bad or outdated techniques ("Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head"? REALLY?!). If threequelitis hadn't hit so badly in the third film, we may never have noticed how weak they were at times. Plus, as the Honest Trailers folks point out, Raimi essentially made the same movie three times. He only really got it right once. Plus, the action sequences in the "Amazing" films are head-and-shoulders above, with so much more thought put into them. Look at the way Spider-Man uses his webs. Aside from the device of having mechanical web shooters (more on this in a moment), Spider-Man uses the webs in much more creative ways — to box in his opponents, to confound and annoy them and, finally, to subdue them. The "Amazing" webs are almost characters unto themselves.
Mechanical web shooters
Remember all the controversy about Tobey Spidey's organic web shooters? Yeah, still dumb, even if we got lulled to sleep with our objections over them in the sequels. That aspect has all been forgotten in the "Amazing" movies, especially considering how right they got the web shooters. Mechanical web shooters add another level of danger and innovation both in the first film, where the Lizard crushes them, and the second, where Electro fries one of them with electricity. They force Peter to do one more thing to tinker with his shooters, which he was constantly doing in the comics.
They're not afraid to go dark
Peter is a touch less well-adjusted in the "Amazing" series than in the Raimi films. He's a little more scarred by Uncle Ben's death and less merely sad, and he has issues with his parents abandoning him. Not to mention killing off Captain Stacy in the first film, then {SPOILER} Gwen herself in this movie. Raimi never had the stones to kill off Mary Jane, now did he?
The Sinister Six
I'm just going to say it: The well-worn superhero movie tenet that says more than one bad guy is a bad idea is just wrong. It's short-sighted, and it just hasn't been properly done yet. Quit being so hung up on giving the bad guys origin stories and loads of unnecessary character development. In "The Amazing Spider-Man 2," Rhino (Paul Giamatti) gets no back story; he's simply a bad guy given a suit. He plays only a small role, but that's all that was asked of him. Sometimes it's OK for our hero to just fight bad guys who don't all have daddy issues. Webb and Co. are developing the Sinister Six as foils to Spider-Man, which I believe is a record for number of bad guys in one superhero movie. So imagine Spider-Man having to take on the Green Goblin...and Rhino. And Kraven the Hunter and Chameleon and Doctor Octopus and the Vulture. Those are some high stakes right there. And it's going to happen.