Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci were a screenwriting duo that recently split to pursue projects individually. I guess that this made the entertainment news because they were big names in the movie writing business. When I recently went over their IMDB profiles, I saw a lot of successful movies listed. If any of these movies were actually good, it wasn’t due to the writing.
Their scatterbrained work is quite evident in Marc Webb’s sequel to his “Spider-Man” reboot from a couple years ago. Like many, I thought the first entry was undeniably too soon to start the series over – and like some people, I thought it wasn’t all that “Amazing.” If anything, it failed to be very different. What was different didn’t seem like an improvement.
One of its major problems was in grounding Peter Parker’s (Andrew Garfield) personal life with his love interest, Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone), in a naturalistic context. When the time came for Spidey to do battle with a giant lizard, my brain contorted in order to allow these two aspects to exist in the same film. In the sequel, Garfield and Stone’s onscreen chemistry is even better – and thus, in conflict with a story of amazing proportions of nonsense.
We all know that the movie business is all about making money. Some people say this in a stupidly condemning way. It’s a business. Of course it’s all about the money. When I see a movie like this, I expect product placement, silliness and a few mindless action scenes. What gets me in a real cynical mood is when the artistic input from the filmmakers has surrendered to the long checklist of everything the producers want in the movie to be sure of its international and domestic box office success.
In this film, we are treated to two villains and a surprise third one just so we’ll come back for more. The mystery subplot involving the disappearance of Peter Parker’s parents continues to take up space with full insistence that it is worth dragging out each movie’s length to fit it in. The film’s messy story develops at a pace that is so fast, there is little time for any introduced element to take life.
Jamie Foxx is a man who becomes a villain for almost no reason except that the movie needs him to be the villain. Before he turns into a glowing blue man, his being cast as a nerd with low self-esteem is about as convincing as some of the characters he played on “In Living Color.”
Dane DeHaan (“Chronicle”) plays the most unlikeable version of Harry Osborn yet. This poor actor needs to break away from being cast as sullen fascistic teens. There’s almost no feeling sorry for his predicament as a dying rich kid in search of a cure that will turn him into a flying leprechaun.
The movie is loud, bright, colorful, filled with overqualified star power and is very expensive looking, yet it leaves me feeling nothing. The movie’s first Spider-Man-to-the-rescue action scene seems acceptably corny and fun enough to entertain the little-kid audience that these movies inevitably draw. Though this led me to another kind of frustration I feel in response to obvious studio greed: I have a real problem with the movie business and their obsession with the PG-13 rating.
Normally, I’ve been annoyed with movies that ought to be rated “R” but are toned down to reach a wider audience. I have a similar suspicion about movies that ought to be rated “PG,” but the studio doesn’t want to lose the teen audience, so they deliver more gunplay, dark violence and long scenes of exposition. The success of “The Dark Knight” series was due to the existence of a big adult audience for that particular hero. Its influence has infected superhero franchises that had no need to be this way. “Spider-Man” shouldn’t be afraid to be delightful.
The bottom line is this question: what excuse is there for screwing up a movie about a superhero? It seems as though the most basic entertaining values are in place with plenty of room to be artistic and creative. Mickey Mouse and his evil imperial troops are doing better with their Marvel properties than Sony and Fox put together.
Bennett Duckworth is a film fanatic who lives in Louisville and goes to see a movie in the theater at least once a week. He has kept a movie review blog since September of 2011 with the mission of writing about every new release he sees, as well as new trends in filmmaking and classic films he loves. You can read more of his reviews at www.bennettduckworth.blogspot.com.