The latest Spider-Man movie covers a lot of familiar web-slinging territory, but the relationship between Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy is still impossibly good.
Niko Tavernise/Columbia Pictures
Watching 2012's The Amazing Spider-Man felt like listening to a close cover version of a song that not so long ago used to be all over the radio. Even in the reboot-ready superhero genre, there was something a little exhausting about the new series' arrival only five years after Sam Raimi wrapped up his hit Spider-Man trilogy. The film hit many of the same beats millions had watched just a decade prior — the bite, the discovery of powers, the death of Uncle Ben, the costume, the girl, the bruising battles.
Of the elements that were added to the revamp, not all of them clicked — like the odd Spidey-POV shot (which has been improved in the sequel, out this Friday) and a storyline involving Peter Parker's parents, which continues to weigh down the franchise in its newest installment. But The Amazing Spider-Man did do something right in reworking Peter (Andrew Garfield) into a moodier, skateboarding loner rather than the classic nerdy underdog.
He still got beat up by bullies, but in defense of someone else. He was awkward, but not hopeless — a contemporary interpretation — and when he developed a crush on Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone), she liked him back before he suited up and started serving up justice. The result was that The Amazing Spider-Man had an actual, adorable two-sided romance in the midst of all its swinging through the city and encounters with the Lizard, one that skipped the usual twists by letting Gwen in on Peter's secret early and having her guess that he'd promised her dying dad (Denis Leary) to stay away.
Niko Tavernise/Columbia Pictures
And Garfield and Stone have brought their warm, irrepressible chemistry to the sequel, which wraps its unwieldy two-and-a-half villains around a love story that's still so sweet and immediate, it tends to dominate the proceedings, making it feel like Jamie Foxx's Electro, Dane DeHaan's Green Goblin, and Paul Giamatti's Rhino are just there to complicate the relationship between Peter and Gwen. The romance in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is its best part, while the superheroics already show signs of fatigue, with the film doubling up on its baddies rather than building them out and giving them understandable motivations.
That's in part due to the unfortunate briskness with which the script — written by (since split) blockbuster collaborators Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci along with Jeff Pinkner, — serves up its antagonists. Ignored Oscorp electrical engineer Max Dillon (Foxx) goes from adoring Spider-Man to hating him after an accident juices him up into the glowing blue Electro, feeling irrationally betrayed because the plot seemingly requires him to. Harry Osborn (DeHaan) shows up as Peter's previously unmentioned, years-absent best friend, and while the two have a nice scene together catching up alongside the DUMBO waterfront, Harry accelerates into desperate and ruthless, then green and evil, with disappointing economy.
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