It's hard to pin down why The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is so inessential. After all, Andrew Garfield is a damn good Spider-man, and Emma Stone is great as Gwen Stacy. Sally Field is a good Aunt May, and Paul Giamatti is fun (if underused) as Rhino. It looks gorgeous, with none of the effects problems that plagued even the best of the Raimi bunch. It even has one of the best scenes in the five Spider-Man movies*. It's a movie that is the lesser sum of its parts, and I'm not sure why.
My guess is that the movie just doesn't have much of a throughline in the story. It kind of bounces around, with three different villains, the continued story of Peter Parker's dad and his relation to what's happening to both Peter and Harry Osborn, and of course the romantic story between Peter and Gwen. There are just too many balls up in the air, and it's no surprise when they don't them all.
It's not as if Raimi's Spider-Man 2, my favorite of all five movies, has one storyline. Beyond the tragedy of Doctor Otto Octavius, there's also the Mary Jane/Peter story, Peter dealing with the pressures of being an underpaid professional and superhero, Harry Osborn stewing in his hatred of Spider-Man for his father's death, and Peter and Aunt May dealing with the death of Uncle Ben. However, they are all tied together very well and resulted in a very memorable film that transcends just being a set of competently made scenes.
Instead, this most recent movie just feels like what it probably is, which is a move by Sony to keep a profitable franchise in its hands, instead of it reverting to the Disney/Marvel Leviathan. Yeah, that's a justifiable decision for a business to make, but it doesn't necessarily make the best movies. In a couple weeks we'll be getting Fox's equivalent with X-Men: Days of Future Past, which could be more of the same, or an actual decent film**. Hopefully it will be better than this movie.
Then again, maybe it has nothing to do with it's ephemeral nature, or it's lack of a thematic point. Perhaps it has everything to do with someone left out of the film save for a small cameo by e-mail. You know, the most important character, that truth-teller at the Daily Bugle. I'm talking about the esteemed editor J. Jonah Jameson. By far this is the most egregious problem with the film, although they'd probably find a way to screw that up if he was in the film, assuming it wasn't J.K. Simmons reprising the role. Yep, I think that's the problem.
Recommendation: Watch it when it comes out for home consumption, unless you are a Spider-Man completist
* CRYPTIC SPOILER ALERT:
** Yes, there's also the reboot of Fantastic Four, but the two previous movies sucked, so no one cares that they are getting replaced.
You people who know a bit about the comics know what event is the center of that scene.
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