The Amazing Spiderman 2

Well this was an intriguing movie. In most ways this is a decent improvement over the last installment of the Andrew Garfield saga. I suppose the largest thing I was frightened by was the imposing 2 hours and 23 minute runtime. And yeah it did feel a little long and certainly had an abundance of characters. Nevertheless this is a really entertaining film. Both the visual and audio aspects are very well done, and the primary villain's specific soundtrack works extremely well with the character.

Jamie Foxx plays Electro and his formerly shy, withdrawn self Max Dillon; and he's a pretty great actor so it works out quite well. He does look pretty terrible in the trailers but it works much better in the film then you might have expected; and Electro is a difficult villain to pull off without CGI thus the abundance of CGI in the film is acceptable. Whenever he's on screen there's a sort of techno/electric audio reverb going on and a lot of the stuff that happens is actually in rhythm with it; most notable being the scene in central park when Jamie Foxx is sort of rhythmically talking to himself, which just sounds kind of awesome. His scenes are probably the strongest part of the film, but he's only in maybe 35-40 minutes of the movie.

Dane Dehaan plays Harry Osborne; and he's pretty underwhelming. I like James Franco in the previous movies, but he's not like incredibly amazing or anything; but Dehaan's Osborne is just kind of irritating at all times. He's not in a ton of the movie and a few of his scenes work pretty well so I don't think his presence is an enormous detriment, but he might make the following movie disappointing. Paul Giamatti of all people is playing motherfucking Rhino; and Giamatti is awesome in everything so obviously that's just great; it's kind of a bit part but that's something to look forward to in the next film.

Emma Stone is excellent and Andrew Garfield pulls off the sarcastic humor bits quite well in this movie; even if the overly emotional scenes are kind of "meh." Look he's no Tobey Maguire in the insufferable category and it's probably more the movie being too bloated with those types of scenes. Gwen Stacey does what Gwen Stacey does; though even in the context of the film that shouldn't be overly surprising. Overall this is quite a solid action movie, and even lacking a dominant villain the film's plot still works well enough for it to carry through. There's even a weird action sequence right at the start that has nothing to do with anything but yet is still pretty fun to watch.