I did a good job missing reviews of Amazing Spider-Man 2. I was aware of a few obvious plot points, which would be impossible not to know if you are a comic book fan. The story of Spider-Man and Gwen Stacy is comic book lore 102. Maybe not as common as knowing Bruce Wayne is Batman but it is definitely one of the seminal comic book stories no comics fan wouldn’t know.

I understand that a ‘comic book movie’ isn’t really concerned about a plot, much like an action film isn’t concerned about plot. Comic book movies, which are becoming big action movies, are all about set pieces, comic book references, some humor and piling on the villains. Corporations have unlimited funds to do whatever they want. Technology can be invented that doesn’t make logical sense. From movie to movie the rules can be changed about what is known and not known about characters. In the case of Spider-Man movies, and this was the case in the first version of the franchise, ordinary citizens do things to show they are as heroic as the hero.

The audience I saw it with seemed satisfied with the results of this film. They never cheered but they laughed at a few of the jokes and seemed rather taken by the CW romcom antics of Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy. However, and maybe this is because I’m a film buff from a long time ago, Amazing Spider-Man 2 is a product of being a product to me. Normally it is the third film in a series that dumps in all sorts of villains, plots and other devices to drag down the production. This happened in the first incarnation of Spider-Man. It was my fear that when Sony announced they were going to branch out and produce a Sinister 6 and a Venom series, this Spider-Man movie might be a launch pad for those spinoffs. To me that is exactly what they did, which gave a terrible disservice to the origins of the story they used for the film.

I’m going to show my 50 years of age a little bit now, because what a lot of comic book films like Amazing Spider-Man have been missing is heart. I would say in recent films, Marvels: Avengers and Captain America: Winter Soldier had a small bit of heart in their productions, Even giving them credit for that, they don’t compare to the movie experiences I’ve had in my younger days. When the first Indiana Jones movie came out, audiences reacted to the screen. They knew it was a movie but they were with Indy from the boulder run to the opening of the Ark. They cheered, they gasped and were emotionally invested in the movie. I remember hearing people cry when Spock died in the real Wrath of Khan. I remember people being in disbelief and discussing hours after the film the revelation in Empire Strikes Back that Darth Vader was Luke’s father. People got emotionally invested with Arnold in Total Recall. For all of its violence, people quoted lines from Robocop, got sick with the shooting of Murphy and by the end of the story they were happy and cheered when Murphy prevailed.

Not every action film need to be War and Peace but it needs a bond with the audience. Increasingly, films like Amazing Spider-Man 2 don’t even try to connect with the audience emotionally. When I watched this film, the romcom interplay with the main characters seemed plucked from another movie. The disjointed nature of their characters was complicated with a plot that was put together from three separate movies. One villain appears, does his dirty work, then another one shows up. That one is dispatched then another takes their place. In the middle a backstory was shoehorned in to justify another villain’s appearance and to give an emotional connection to Spider-Man. At the end, the villains are throw away pieces. They come, they fight, they are defeated then another is plugged in to keep the action going.

I have to talk about Jamie Foxx’s performance as Electro. I guess it is ironic that two In Living Color performers were able to stink up their respective super-villain outings by playing the same character. Jamie Foxx in Amazing Spider-Man 2 essentially does the same performance Jim Carrey did in Batman Forever. Nerdy scientist has no friends. Nerdy scientist has his work stolen. Nerdy scientist has run in with their hero gets an obsession complex. An accident happens that twists their minds and all of a sudden they must kill their obsession.

What is another bothersome point to me in films like Amazing Spider-Man 2, today’s audiences with blockbuster summer films is willing to give the creators over two hours to tell their stories. Amazing Spider-Man 2 clocked in at just over two hours and 20 minutes, yet the result was a jumbled mess of different film genres jammed together just so the studio could introduce concepts for their next franchises. All that openness to go an on journey and to me audiences are subjected to a prolonged sales pitch for product placement and new additions to the cinematic franchise.

Amazing Spider-Man 2 to me was a long string of missed opportunities to tell a compelling story in favor of pushing cinematic concepts for the continuing movie franchise.