10 Awesome Things In The Best Summer Movie Season Ever‏

9. A New Take On The Rhino (And More Jokes!) - The Amazing Spider-Man 2

The Scene: The Amazing Spider-Man 2 might not have been a perfect film (far from it, in fact), but director Marc Webb at least managed to bookend his messy attempt at throwing everything-and-the-evil-German-scientist into a superhero sequel with a couple of objectively brilliant sequences. The movie opens with our wallcrawling hero chasing after Paul Giamatti's Russian gangster Aleksei Sytsevich, who's just stolen a truck full of plutonium. Y'know, the way that Russian gangsters often do. Aleksei gets a chance at revenge at the very end of the film, when he's been suited up with a walking, tank-like Rhino robot with which to do battle against Andrew Garfield's Spider-Man. Why It's Awesome: The opening sequence of the film typifies everything that the rebooted Spider-Man movie franchise gets right about the character. It's light, it's entertaining, the mix of CGI and stunts is pretty much flawless, and above all else - it's funny. Humour is a vital part of Peter Parker's persona (try saying that five times fast), and one that was pretty much forgotten by Sam Raimi's previous Spidey trilogy. Garfield is particularly adept at the one-liners and the physical comedy, both of which feature a lot here. The movie's last scene ends rather abruptly but the adaptation of Rhino from a hulking dude in a grey, skin-tight costume to a crazy Russian in a mech suit is inspired, as is the casting of usually straight actor Giamatti in a hilariously hammy, scenery-chewing bit part.