Just five years after the end of the groundbreaking trilogy that helped to shape the superhero movie genre, the Spider-Man franchise was rebooted. Andrew Garfield replaced Tobey Maguire in the red-and-blue spandex, Marc Webb replaced Sam Raimi in the director’s chair, and a Batman Begins-esque dark tone replaced the more lighthearted (and faithful) style of the Raimi trilogy.
While Garfield gave a great performance as Peter Parker, The Amazing Spider-Man movies’ rogues’ gallery of villains was a mixed bag. Jamie Foxx’s Electro is a lot of fun, but Dane DeHaan’s Green Goblin is a bitter disappointment.
After the overstuffed script of Spider-Man 3 was panned by critics, Sony made the exact same mistake with The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Like Raimi’s threequel (and Iron Man 2 and The Dark Knight Rises and X-Men: The Last Stand), The Amazing Spider-Man 2 has too many villains. It can’t seem to make up its mind about who the bad guy is, jumping between Electro, the Rhino, and the Green Goblin. Unlike the other two, the Goblin had already been adapted in the previous trilogy – and to much greater effect. This version of the Goblin is a whiny teenager.
Dane DeHaan’s role in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 rehashes the familiar Harry Osborn villain arc from the Raimi trilogy and crams it into a single movie. Harry has supposedly been Peter’s best friend for 10 years, but he wasn’t even mentioned in the previous movie. Whereas Willem Dafoe’s Goblin was genuinely unsettling, DeHaan’s was instantly forgettable.
One of the many origin plot points that The Amazing Spider-Man borrows from Raimi’s first Spider-Man movie is Peter’s abrasive relationship with his bully, Flash Thompson. Like Raimi’s Flash, Webb’s Flash is a typical loudmouthed jock. He’s the captain of the football team who picks on nerds – it’s a pretty one-dimensional role.
Joe Manganiello proved in the Raimi movies that it’s possible to give a memorable turn as Flash and make this one-note archetype feel unique. Chris Zylka’s take on Flash from The Amazing Spider-Man movies isn’t as memorably hammy as Manganiello’s performance in the Raimi movies or as surprisingly subversive as Tony Revolori’s turn in the MCU movies.
The Rhino bookends The Amazing Spider-Man 2: Spidey thwarts Russian mobster Aleksei Sytsevich in the opening scene, then faces Aleksei’s “Rhino” form in the final scene. This version of the Rhino isn’t a musclebound brute in the mold of Bane in a goofy gray Halloween costume like he is in the comics; he wears a giant mechanical rhino suit from Oscorp. Somehow, this mechanical suit looks even goofier than the gray Halloween costume from the comics. This disappointing design is helped by a great performance by Paul Giamatti, one of the greatest actors working today.
The script gives this live-action Rhino a paper-thin characterization, but Giamatti does what he can with a classic supervillain role, taking every opportunity to ham it up. The ending of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 sets up the Rhino as the main antagonist of the next film. It would’ve been interesting to see where Webb was going with this character in the ultimately unproduced Amazing Spider-Man threequel (and what Giamatti would’ve done with a more substantial role).
Raimi’s trilogy forged a multi-movie arc with Dr. Curt Connors as he develops a personal mentor relationship with Maguire’s Peter Parker, one of his most gifted (but also most distracted) college students. But Raimi never turned Connors into the Lizard, because he and Sony mutually parted ways after Spider-Man 3 and his Spider-Man 4 project was retooled as a reboot telling Spidey’s origin story from scratch. Instead of following up on the established dynamic from the Raimi/Maguire movies, The Amazing Spider-Man created a new mentor-mentee relationship between Rhys Ifans’ Connors and Garfield’s Peter Parker. This Connors is one of Oscorp’s leading scientists and the former partner of Peter’s late father.
In his Lizard form, this character looks too silly to be intimidating. He’s just a bland CGI creature. No Way Home made fun of this Lizard’s ridiculous plan to turn every New Yorker into a regenerative reptile. It would’ve been great to see what Raimi would’ve done with the character, drawing on his background in horror to create a classic sewer-dwelling B-movie monster.
Jamie Foxx plays one of the many villains in The Amazing Spider-Man 2: Max Dillon, better known as Electro. This was yet another villain whose origins are tied to Oscorp. Max worked as an electrical engineer at Oscorp before falling into a vat of electric eels at the office and acquiring electrical superpowers. Although Electro is woefully mischaracterized as a nebbish nerd in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, his role in the sequel is elevated by Foxx’s captivating on-screen presence.
In No Way Home, the revamped Electro was given a characterization that was more in line with both Foxx’s ice-cool charms as a movie star and the familiar icon from the source material (the VFX team even gave him a bolt of lightning that looks like his classic mask). Foxx’s scene-stealing turn in No Way Home proved how great his role in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 could’ve been with stronger writing.
