Review Detail

I've never been so wrong in my life. I mean, I have been following and enjoying the work of Lantern51 for a while now and he has done quite a few highly remarkable edits, including the first Amazing Spider-Man... but that was a movie I already liked to begin with, while I had long dismissed TASM 2 as just plain awful, so I expected it to be improved to a degree only, as not much, I thought, could be made with it.

How wrong I was. Turns out that TASM 2 did have a good movie at its core. And this edit has revealed it. I found myself unexpectedly LOVING this, so much that if it had been released this way to theaters it'd actually be near the top of my favorite Spidey movies.

Once layers and layers and layers of garbage at all levels (not sure how many of those can be attributed to executive meddling, which this movie famously suffered from highly, and how many to Marc Webb himself, but I digress), turns out that there's a story with a LOT of heart underneath. The movie is now primarily about the relationship between Peter and Gwen, which is touching, sad, sweet, and tragic all through. And her fate is even more heartbreaking than ever, since this time around I was actually caring.

On the villain side of things, the feel of this cut is now that Harry is the main villain, with Electro sidelined to a "dragon" role. Which makes a lot of sense, as Harry is the one personally connected to Peter and the one that in the end is responsible of you know what. I still think Dane DeHaan is a less than ideal choice for the role, but works well enough. As for Jamie Foxx, he always had the potential to be a magnificent Electro (as he demonstrated in No Way Home), but was saddled with a goofy approach by the filmmakers. The removal of the goofiness has the side effect of putting the focus away from him, but given what was there in the original, let it be this way. This movie, like almost every superhero movie, had too many villains to begin with.

What you WON'T find in this edit: goofy Max Dillon, truncated subplots that go nowhere, dubstep themes for Electro, or clichéd Strauss music for the mad scientist that I still refuse to call Dr. Kafka. Speaking of the music, this has been an elephantine effort at audio replacement, and given the circumstances of having to run a lot of stuff through audio separation AI, it came out remarkably well. It's true that it may not have a totally professional bells-and-whistles sound after all this work (and to be honest the volume is somewhat too low all through), but given the tremendous work it took, it's probably is the best that can be done outside of getting raw unmixed audio files, and my rating is adjusted accordingly. Also, the replacement songs all work really great and fit the character and the mood.

As one of said songs, which can be heard over the closing credits, says, "change can be amazing". And in this case, it is. I don't know if it's a silk purse out of a sow's ear or the silk purse was always there and needed to have the sow's ear removed. Anyway, along with Part 1, this is highly recommended to all Spidey fans. Again, Excelsior!