The Craptacular Spider-man!
I saw Spider-man 2 last night. The moment the “deedly-deedly” soundtrack swept in over the title card, intermixed with Paul Giamatti as the Rhino yelling in an awful Russian accent, this look passed across my face.
I guess I’ve gotten spoiled with the superhero movies that Marvel has been putting out lately, because this one took me completely by surprise. It was a return to the old “Dolph Lungdren as The Punisher” era of superhero film. I mean, it was no Toby Maguire Spider-man 3 bad, but it was pretty bad.
The effects of the film were clearly split into two categories: Electro and Not Electro. The Not Electro effects were roughly the same quality as the cyborg shooting lasers out of its eye in a commercial for a local exterminator service. Spider-man looked like Play-doh half the time when he was swinging around in slo-mo, which would have been cool if anything else in the movie stylistically resembled that. Instead it just clashed against the nearly flawless execution of Electro.
This villain was definitely the high point of the movie, both in effects and acting . . . after he changed into Electro. Before he changed into Electro we were treated with Jamie Foxx’s best “Jerry Lewis as the Nutty Professor” impression. Afterwards Foxx was clearly given leeway to chew scenes like he was Brian Blessed, and he took that shit up to Jeremy Irons level. The character of Electro has classically been rather pathetic in the comics – his outfit was always a joke, and Spider-man easily defeated him time and time again. Foxx added a level of menace that has always been strangely missing from a psychopath that can shoot lightning bolts out of his fingers.
The dialogue of the movie was either sappy or wooden, bouncing from soap opera to slapstick to drama from scene to scene. It gave the actors very little to grab onto for character depth, which is no wonder given how many characters were squeezed in. The entire film was clearly cherry-picked bits from four separate rejected scripts. The one notable exception to this travesty was Chris Cooper, who was fantastic as Norman Osborn in the 2 minutes he was in the film. Notably bad was Dane DeHaan, whose acting was reminiscent of a young Leonard DiCaprio stunt double. His makeup as the Green Goblin would probably have been voted off on Face-Off.
Finally the soundtrack and music for the movie was so disconcertingly off tone for the film that it seriously damaged even the scenes that might have been salvaged. The light hearted scenes were one kazoo away from being scored with Yakety Sax, and every scene involving Electro also involved that super cliche sci-fi foghorn that’s everywhere now. That thing is getting more play than the Willhelm.
To sum – the effects were awful, the dialogue terrible, the script a mishmash of four separate movies, and the soundtrack was distractingly bad. And yet, after all of that, I am left with one question, one haunting question: WHY THE FUCK WAS PAUL GIAMATTI EVEN IN THIS MOVIE?
