The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014, Marc Webb) (Patreon)

44/100

[Spoilers, though I gather that the relevant event gets recycled in No Way Home so presumably there aren't many folks left unaware.]

Well, this is embarrassing. 

Quick personal history: My dad was a comics fanatic when I was growing up, buying more or less every Marvel and DC title that existed (plus a zillion others). Never really got the bug myself, despite being a voracious reader back then—I preferred more words, fewer illustrations—but I did blitz through all of his old Spider-Man issues, having first discovered Spidey via appearances on The Electric Company (an educational kids' TV show that literally taught me to read at age three, before I started school and with zero help from or even initial awareness by my parents*) and then gotten into the '60s animated series in syndication. And while Dad unfortunately hadn't begun hanging onto his comics as early as Amazing Spider-Man #1 (which he remembers reading contemporaneously), his collection went back pretty far, I believe to somewhere around #35. (Don't know for sure because those boxes were stolen at some point while stored rather carelessly in the basement of an office building that his accounting firm shared with several others.) Certainly he had #121-122, which I probably didn't read at the time of their publication (1973; I was five) but definitely did encounter at a tender enough age for Gwen Stacy to become the first fictional character whose unexpected death would make a permanent impression upon me. Just how much of an impression I discovered only toward the end of this otherwise terrible movie, when tears suddenly took a shameful stroll down my cheeks.

To be a little fair to myself, Peter and Gwen's relationship is the one aspect of Contractual Necessity 2 that sorta kinda works, even as they seemingly go through the break-up/reconciliation cycle every 20 minutes. Webb, of course, launched his career with a facile yet sometimes surprisingly realistic romdram (apologies for that term), so it's not surprising that he leans even harder into that element here, encouraging Garfield and Stone to pretend that they're not trapped in an F/X-heavy franchise entry; when Peter points out that hiding from bad guys in a maintenance closet is a cliché, and Gwen sarcastically replies "Oh, I'm sorry I didn't take us to the Bahamas of hiding places," these two briefly come across as...well, not as real people, exactly, but at least as characters who transcend "hero" and "hero's girlfriend." Key word there is "briefly," though, with far more time and energy expended upon making Foxx's Electro physically unappealing and psychologically incoherent, then mostly sidelining him so that Dane DeHaan can serve up another of his anti-charismatic, weirdly reptilian turns. (I'll concede that he looks more like a prospective goblin than did James Franco.) Not sure which is dumber: Electro instantly shifting from apologetic bewilderment to psychotic rage upon seeing his image across Times Square's way-too-many live newsfeeds replaced by his hero Spider-Man's, or Richard Parker having hidden his secret lab not merely in a disused subway tunnel but in a subway car that rises from underneath a false section of track. For two solid hours, in every respect save for its occasionally charming "teen" romance, this Spider-Man is even worse than its predecessor, which is saying something. 

Still, I cannot in good conscience pretend that I was not a weepy mess at the end. It's not just that they killed Gwen off, though Stone gives her enough vitality (there's even a post-mortem montage of her many fetching smiles) that it probably would've been at least a little affecting even if botched. And it's not even just that Webb quasi-replicates the '73 panels, with Gwen's body dangling limply at web's end, suggesting that Spider-Man may have inadvertently killed her himself (snapping her neck) in trying to save her. I think it's that this particular comic-book moment/arc/storyline/whatever is so iconic that the movies keep feinting at it without following through. Raimi's original Spider-Man remains the gold standard, but it's always slightly bugged me that he fashioned two versions of that fall (substituting Mary Jane for Gwen) with happy endings; same's kinda true of Far From Home, in which Mysterio drops MJ from the top of the Eiffel Tower but it's just another illusion. (That film admittedly followed this one, but I saw it first.) So my unexpectedly intense reaction is likely a combination of childhood reckoning with mortality + the cathartic "relief" that someone finally acknowledged the ugly truth: She fucking dies. Given that I only went back and watched this turkey because someone alerted me that it informs a crucial moment in No Way Home (which I'm only going back and watching as prep for Multiverse of Madness; it never ends), and given my more-than-sneaking suspicion that Gwen's death is precisely what gets reiterated in some form, I'm now both curious about and wary of what kind of mortifying response my next homework assignment may trigger.  

Still, let me conclude by emphasizing: This movie mostly blows. One well-executed sequence that happened to tug at something in me dating back nearly half a century does not change that. 

* The story my mom has always told has Dad reading the newspaper at the breakfast table and three-year-old me suddenly piping up out of nowhere with "Boy, 4, drowns." Whereupon he flipped the paper over and found that headline on the page that had been facing me. I of course have no memory of this, and don't know that I really believe it, but it sounds good. Were I fabulously wealthy, I might hire someone to comb the microfiche archives for the San Jose Mercury News ca. 1971-72, see whether that headline can actually be found.