The Amazing Spider-Man 2: Stuffed with content is not always a good thing.

If there's one thing that the Marvel Cinematic Universe and all of its imitators have taught us, it's that rushing things like world building and sequel baiting is never a good idea. There are times when it works, a nod here, a cameo there, but stopping the movie for the sake of sequel bait never works, especially if the sequel isn't in active development yet. Build it up slowly, and people will be willing to accept it because you could tease a movie that is years away and people will happily accept it because they know it's going to happen. But if you, for example, tease the appearance of a team of six villains by forcing three of the potential candidates into one movie, and have scenes teasing the others, including ones that people know can hold their own movies, especially in a sequel to a less then critically acclaimed film... At least this wasn't the Dark Universe?

Why do I bring all of that up? It's because the plot for this movie tries to do several things. In terms of story threads, we have Electro, Harry Osborn as the Green Goblin (who even though I saw the movie recently, I do not recall Harry being in ASM 1), the death of Gwen Stacey, Rhino... who's in this for some reason, promoted heavily but probably has less screen time then the Dinobots did in Transformers 4, I cannot be bothered to check because I've been busy at work, and that would require me to watch anything to do with Transformers 4 again, and then of course the big Sinister Six teaser. I know I should be talking about the plot, but the problem is that the plot is so full of world building and cramming in things for the sake of sequels that there is no real story here. This movie existed to set up the Sinister Six versus Spider-Man in his Venom suit, along with many, many, many more movies. I'm not kidding when I say the most interesting thing to come out of Amazing Spider-Man 2 was all the crazy plans that they had hoping this movie would be a success. How much do you want to bet though that now Venom was a success, many of those plans are going to come back?

Who would win a beauty contest. Him or Wade in X-Men Origins: Jimmy?

Why do I bring all of this up instead of talking about the movie? Because the movie itself, while not completely awful, is once again boring, and the overstuffed nature of the world building doesn't give anything time to breath. Rhino could have been cut from the movie, and nothing would have been lost, heck Electro could have been cut too because while he's an ok villain, there's nothing exciting about him or this take on Green Goblin. While, once again, the CGI is done really well in terms of camera angles, and some of the fights are well done, the story structure holds back even some of those moments like Peter trying to save Gwen before she hits the ground. Before people ask, I'm pretty sure this was before Ghost Spider was either a thing that existed, or was popular, so I can't really call them out on a wasted opportunity in regards to her getting spider powers. Do I think it was dumb to kill her in movie two? Yes, I do, especially when knowing it was to bring the Venom suit in. Seriously, I need to know, who at Sony has such a fascination with Venom that they think he has to be in everything! Will one of the things needed to keep Spider-Man in the MCU be "his third solo movie must have the Venom suit"? I'd go on about how sick I am of it in terms of Sony, but then I remember Venom's next week.

What good things can I say about the movie other than the CGI's good? The writing's a bit better, though it still has some of the trappings of the first one (like the whole "it was destiny that made you Spider-man" crap). The suit looks better than the first film, though the white eyes stand out like a sore thumb. Still, better than the look they gave for Green Goblin in this movie. Electro... looks ok. Far removed from the source (in other news, the sky is blue), but an interesting take. Eel thing was still dumb though. It's aged slightly better, but the movie crushing issue is that this isn't a movie. It's bait for sequels, sequels that will never come. It's for that reason that, and I will happily say this now, I wanted Venom to fail. Not because I thought the movie looked bad, I was kinda impartial to it during its marketing, but because I knew that if it was successful, then it would spark something like this again, something that I know is happening because I believe Black Cat, Silver Sabel and Kraven movies are already being worked on. Well, next week I'll finally see what all the commotion about it is because I didn't see it at cinemas, so I'm going into it blind, along with Sunday's review of The Wolverine.