I found the first film to be a solid movie. A bit over-indulgent and over-praised but solid. This on the other hand, takes all the bad aspects of the first movie and cranks it up to eleven. First off, this doesn't feel like a story about Miles Morales. Sadly we are still doing the multi-verse gimmick that has worn off three years ago. To top it off the 150 minutes runtime is in no way justified for offering such a thin story. Most action scenes are far too long, especially the one with the Vulture and the mid-escape chase scene. That one in particular felt like a redo of the lab chase from the first film. A lot of times the movie was trying to recreate moments from the previous installement without the heart.
And what's with the mediocre voice acting this time? Especially the opening monologue of Gwen Stacy felt like it was read from last-minute cue cards. To be fair, I liked the Gwen Stacy story arc in the beginning, but then they used an unbelievable character moment to make her force her hand to join the Spiderverse. And this is where the movie lost me. This whole world and the explanation of it's existence reeks of desperate attempts of an industry that is trying to sell the same doll with a different dress. I just don't watch superheroes to see them having existential crisis, it plagues the comic movies since The Dark Knight. They even implemented this narrative hook on characters like Superman (Man of Steel) who are the antithesis of this outlook and we saw how that went down.
It's no coincidence that the story got very thin after we get to the Spiderverse. From then on the writers can only throw action set pieces after the audience to fill up the two and a half hours runtime (!). Seriously it was really boring, sometimes laughable (that shot of the hologram that reveals the serious face of Spiderman 2099) and the scenes that were supposed to make you laugh were tired. Especially the quips during the action were otherworldly bad. And once the dust settled, they filmmakers could not even manage to end it in a mildly satisfying conclusion. There are ways to end a story with certain degree of closure while some story strands aren't resolved. It's an art for a reason. But this is just plain lazy. What they dish out as a cliffhanger should have been the mid-turning-point of the movie. If they had any talented writers at all they would have made this movie with Miles and Gwen in their respectable world without crossing over into the other person's universe. Seemingly having a different story but with the same theme connecting them. That would of course require more work in the writing department to pull off, but you can tell that right after the success of the first movie they wanted to keep the machine running to churn out another one of these as fast as possible. And although four years seems like a long time for a movie, I can assure it's not for an animated movie. Especially one with this magnitude of animation quality, runtime and post production requirements. Unfortunately it didn't deliver, I was honestly rooting for this film but at least I don't regret anymore that I missed it in cinema.
4 out of 10.
And what's with the mediocre voice acting this time? Especially the opening monologue of Gwen Stacy felt like it was read from last-minute cue cards. To be fair, I liked the Gwen Stacy story arc in the beginning, but then they used an unbelievable character moment to make her force her hand to join the Spiderverse. And this is where the movie lost me. This whole world and the explanation of it's existence reeks of desperate attempts of an industry that is trying to sell the same doll with a different dress. I just don't watch superheroes to see them having existential crisis, it plagues the comic movies since The Dark Knight. They even implemented this narrative hook on characters like Superman (Man of Steel) who are the antithesis of this outlook and we saw how that went down.
It's no coincidence that the story got very thin after we get to the Spiderverse. From then on the writers can only throw action set pieces after the audience to fill up the two and a half hours runtime (!). Seriously it was really boring, sometimes laughable (that shot of the hologram that reveals the serious face of Spiderman 2099) and the scenes that were supposed to make you laugh were tired. Especially the quips during the action were otherworldly bad. And once the dust settled, they filmmakers could not even manage to end it in a mildly satisfying conclusion. There are ways to end a story with certain degree of closure while some story strands aren't resolved. It's an art for a reason. But this is just plain lazy. What they dish out as a cliffhanger should have been the mid-turning-point of the movie. If they had any talented writers at all they would have made this movie with Miles and Gwen in their respectable world without crossing over into the other person's universe. Seemingly having a different story but with the same theme connecting them. That would of course require more work in the writing department to pull off, but you can tell that right after the success of the first movie they wanted to keep the machine running to churn out another one of these as fast as possible. And although four years seems like a long time for a movie, I can assure it's not for an animated movie. Especially one with this magnitude of animation quality, runtime and post production requirements. Unfortunately it didn't deliver, I was honestly rooting for this film but at least I don't regret anymore that I missed it in cinema.
4 out of 10.
