What makes The Amazing Spider-Man 2 such a heinous crime is that at its core is was repeating the exact same problems that brought down Spider-Man 3 and the whole Raimi run of the series. What edges the original threequel ahead of the recent sequel is that there's still a clear attempt to tell a coherent, stand-alone story. At its heart Spider-Man 3 has too many villains. It is an unavoidable problem that is central to everything else that went wrong with the film. But as Christopher Nolan showed with his Batman movies, it is possible to have multiple villains run through a film and it not feel crowded. The issue here is that each villain is fundamentally flawed to the point where they probably wouldn't work on their own. Sandman is a mopey anti-hero who is lazily retconned into relevance, Venom is never explored beyond being a literal embodiment of inner-angst and the new Green Goblin, whom the series has been setting up for three films now, has amnesia central to his arc. The franchise had got to the point where it was so big that the studio felt they needed something with a wide appeal and began to override the creative decisions (see also, Batman Forever). There's glimmers of good ideas in here - the Sandman origin sequence is visually brilliant and when taken out of context of the story some of the action sequences are fun - but it's overwhelmed by a sense of compromise.
