Rise of Electro - Amazingly Bad

Amazing Spiderman 2 is a bad movie. Hell, just from looking at the trailers I’m sure many would come to the same conclusion, but it isn’t until after you’ve sat through it, after the dust settles and you get to dwell on it does it become apparent just how bad it is. The movie actually gets worse in real-time. Initially the movie seems alright, and I admit to thinking around the first third mark, that I was going to have a good time. It seemed to have righted most of the wrong of the first movie. Then, all of a sudden, the film slams the brakes on, stops the action and dwells on all the boring crap from the first movie in painstaking detail.

Peter Parker is living it up as Spiderman, becoming a beloved hero of New York City. While he stops criminals and bullies and the likes as Spiderman, in his personal life he’s struggling with the mystery of his dead parents and his relationship with girlfriend Gwen Stacy. After the death of Oscorp CEO Norman Osborne, his son Harry inherits his wealth, his company and also a genetic disease that will kill him unless he finds a cure. Oscorp has been pumping money into genetic research (which lead to the Lizardman situation in the first film) and Harry thinks that the solution to his illness lies in Spiderman’s blood. Max, a nerdy technician obsessed with Spiderman, has an accident involving a tank full of electric eels and becomes Electro, an electricity-powered supervillain who is out to kill Spiderman. The two decide to join forces for their mutual goal of spilling Spiderman’s blood.

While it may sound exciting, the movie handles itself poorly, spending half its length re-treading old ground excessively. The pacing is all over the place. The first third keeps things moving pretty well up until Electro shows up, but after that the entire middle of the movie drags on painfully with relationship issues and Peter brooding about his dead parents as not much else happens. Electro spends most of the movie off-screen in a secret prison (for a movie named ‘Rise of Electro’, he actually doesn’t do much), while Harry Osborn doesn’t do much until right at the end where he decides to turn evil. Things that the original Spiderman movie trilogy established are glossed over here, partly in necessity. It’s mentioned briefly that Peter takes photos of Spiderman for the newspaper and when Harry Osborne shows up we’re assumed to already know they were childhood friends.

The effects aren’t great. Action scenes are a mess of CGI actors flying around the screen. Actually it’s astounding how ugly the designs are. Jamie Foxx made of electricity looks silly, and in action scenes he’s mostly portrayed as a blur of energy. The worst has to be Harry’s version of the Green Goblin. He looks like an evil leprechaun, with big dirty teeth, a curled shock of orange hair and green, almost reptilian skin. He just looks silly. Speaking of silliness, the Green Goblin and Rhino (from the ads) are only in it for five minutes each at the very end of the movie, the former as part of the final battle and the latter at the very end, not even figuring into the plot at all.

There is a lot of really fucking stupid things in this movie. Many have to do with Electro. Electro’s inner monologue is played, during action scenes, as a rhyming rock song in the background. No shit, I am not making this up, with dialogue along the lines of ‘Nobody will look at me, Spiderman’s my enemy!’. Before then, Max as a character is that concerning superhero cliché that a lonely nerd, when given powers, turns evil (same deal in Green Lantern). There are a few scenes involving a ridiculous ‘evil scientist’ character that have nothing to do with anything, while a side-plot about power struggles in Oscorp has no ending.  

Tonally this is a cluster fuck. Sometimes it’s all fun and games as Peter messes with technology (similarly to Tony Stark messing around in Iron Man), but then there’ll be scenes of him crying and brooding. He breaks up and gets back together with Gwen something like three times over the course of the film, while he constantly flip-flops between wanting to solve his parent’s disappearance, to not caring, to crying about it. The scenes where he is playing Spiderman are out of place because his quips and lame jokes are too cheesy compared to the grimness the rest of the movie tries to throw around. Peter is also still trying to figure out the mystery of his parent’s disappearance, leading to a lot of scenes where he’s brooding or crying because he’s sad that his daddy left him. This time at least we get a conclusion to this plot thread, but it’s an unsatisfactory one. The biggest tonal shift comes at the end of the finale, with a genuinely shocking and unexpected event that shows a lot of balls to break from the general status-quo most non-Marvel superhero movies go for. That being said it doesn’t quite mesh well with the rest of the movie.
The big thread the movie climbs along is the ‘Peter Parker/Gwen Stacy’ relationship. Peter loves Gwen, but feels dishonest about breaking the deathbed promise he made with her dad about keeping her out of danger. Thus we have a lot of awkward scenes of two eighteen years olds playing out relationship drama you’d expect from a weak romantic comedy. This entire subplot overtakes the movie, leaving the whole middle of the film an almost aimless wasteland until Harry turns evil and Electro goes on the loose for the finale.

Acting is all generally decent for the main two characters. Andrew Garfield is schizophrenic as the emotionally imbalanced Peter Parker, going from goofy to brooding to heroic to brooding to whatever else they need to character to be. His personality is constantly changing depending on whether he’s Spiderman or Peter. Emma Stone is probably the best as Gwen Stacy, playing the girlfriend who likes Peter but is exasperated by him (she is miles better than Kristen Stewart’s annoying and needy Mary Jane from the original series). The two together actually work as a couple on screen. The rest of the acting is bad. Jamie Foxx is odd, enthusiastically playing Max as a nerdy comedy sort of character. The second he turns into Electro, he becomes one of the most boring villains ever, just standing around yelling about killing Spiderman. Paul Giamatti’s exceptionally brief cameo appearance as the Rhino is about eight lines of an awful Russian accent yelling ‘I am killer!’ and ‘I am Rhino I beat Spiderman!’ for the five minutes of screen time he gets.

In the end I don’t know what more there is to say. Rise of Electro is a bad superhero movie, a sort of ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ film where the more you consider it the more you realise how nothing adds up, how awful and inconsistent it is, how many bizarre plot holes there are. Compared to the first Amazing Spiderman film, I’d say it’s better by virtue of trying more and having a bigger budget (even if it fails, it’s more interesting than the bore-fest origin story they’d pumped out). Compared to the big dogs in the genre, like the recently released Captain America: The Winter Soldier, it’s an embarrassing mess.