10 Changes That Would Have Improved The Amazing Spider-Man 2

8. More Brutal Editing

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 clocks up at a bum-shifting 142 minutes. Needless to say, this is a mammoth run-time, roughly twenty minutes less than the super-epic Dark Knight Rises. Yet unlike Nolan's effort, this isn't the conclusion of a franchise €“ it's just the start of one. So this film isn't tying up threads in a longwinded, Lord Of The Rings-style, it's merely setting up play. If you look at it like that, you've got to be worried €“ what's going to happen come The Amazing Spider-Man 4, and they're not only keeping plates spinning from the second, but the third instalment too? Frankly, the run-time cripples this film, so god knows what it'll do in the future. Marc Webb has a knack for small character moments, but there's just so many of them here that the better ones get lost in the deluge, meaning that even Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone's chemistry €“ the secret weapon of the previous film €“ gets buried under the sheer amount of plot Webb has to keep ticking over. There's the Richard Parker conspiracy, the Sinister Six, the Green Goblin, Electro, Peter's guilt over Captain Stacey, his on-off relationship with Gwen and Aunt May's worrying (more on that later) to stuff in somehow. That's far, far too much for one film alone. Like the previous point, this was probably something to do with the studio's attempt to kick-start a franchise. But as Marvel have shown us, the less-is-more approach works better here €“ it's better to drip-feed the audience and build the house gradually then rush to put a roof on when you've only just dug the foundations. You could've hacked out a lot of the Sinister Six build-up without truly hurting the film, and it was crying out for a Harvey Weinstein-style figure to take their scissors to it. As is, it's just bloated, and full of moments that seem superfluous.