"Um, did your traffic jam have something to do with the Russian mob?"
Ouch. This is a rubbish film, isn't it? I mean, Andrew Garfield is great. Emma Stone, too. Jamie Foxx is superb in a very different take on Electro, although Dane DeHaan misses the mark as Harry Osborn. Still, the cast is pretty good, although Paul Giamatti is absolutely slumming it in a part like this. So why is the film such utter pants? After all, nobody wants to make a bad film.
For a fair chunk of the running time I was expecting to be expressing the opinion that this was a good script ruined by bad direction. Marc Webb was ok in the film's predecessor but this instalment is shot much more obviously like a music video, and is frankly annoying with all that jiggery pokery with the POV of the camera. I don't mind creative camerawork, in fact I admire it. But when it draws attention to the artifice, as it does here, it fails.
But it's not just the camerawork. This film has Electro, a half-hearted Green Goblin with a rushed backstory, and an even more half-hearted Rhino. Electro is sidelined tooo much to be effective as a villain,whereas the whole attempt to replicate Gerry Conway's classic 1970s comics tale of the Green Goblin and the tragic death of Gwen Stacy is frankly an insult in how rushed it is. The entire conceit of Gwen's graduation speech, and how it seems to impart extra maning after her death, is the ultimate in faux profundity. It really is a pathetic waste of a storyline that could have been devastatingly good.
I seem to be on a run of bad Marvel films. Can we have a good one, please?
No comments:
Post a Comment