Peter Bradshaw 

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 review – appealing leads and zappy scraps, but a sense of deja vu

Peter Bradshaw: The webslinger and his conspicuously male adversaries have some zappy scraps in this reboot sequel, but the most intriguing clashes here are between Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy
  
  

Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone in The Amazing Spider-Man 2
'Easily the best scenes in the film' … Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Photograph: Niko Tavernise Photograph: Niko Tavernise/PR

Here is the second new Spider-Man film – or the fifth, if you are tactless enough to remember the once colossal Sam Raimi-directed trilogy that finished in 2007, quickly to become the boringly obsolete boot to this reboot – a sobering lesson in consumer capitalism and franchise movie-making.

This latest Spidey, written by Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and Jeff Pinkner and directed by Marc Webb, is high-energy entertainment; Andrew Garfield's Peter Parker has rangy charm and there is a genuine romantic spark between him and Emma Stone, as sharp as ever playing Gwen Stacy. Webb at one stage conjures a beautiful seasons-passing montage of Peter Parker's unhappy loneliness that reminded me of the relationship comedy (500) Days of Summer, which made his name. But despite sensational new backstory developments, the sense of template deja vu here is unavoidable, and as in Raimi's SM3, the dramatic investment is thinly spread across a portfolio of characters, each of whom individually has quite a small supporting role.

As well as the Gwen situation, there is Parker's tense, class-divide-straddling bromance with high-school contemporary Harry Osborn, played by Dane DeHaan (from the Beat-era drama Kill Your Darlings and Josh Trank's Chronicle). He is destined to clash with Spider-Man as the Green Goblin. The other antagonist, Electro, is played by Jamie Foxx – a lonely and unappreciated electrical engineer, Max Dillon, is fatefully electrocuted into supervillainy. There are also tiny walk-ons for Paul Giamatti as Russian bad guy Alexei Sytsevich, or The Rhino, and Felicity Jones as Felicia, Harry Osborn's new assistant. Everyone brings their professional A-game and the hollow-eyed DeHaan is a fiercer and more plausible Harry than James Franco ever was. His wan, faintly poignant listlessness brings to mind Gilbert Adair's description of Michael Jackson: "The face of an adolescent masturbator, dishevelled, drained and ashy-white." However, Foxx is wasted in the role of Electro. It is strange to see this star, so magnificent in Django Unchained, playing such a so-so part (he was better as the mousy nerd in Michael Mann's Collateral). Still, Foxx and Garfield get a rousingly zappy spectacular in which Spider-Man confronts Electro in a strange digital simulacrum of New York's Times Square.

In this very masculine world, there still seems to be no question of a female villain, and despite being notionally on different sides of the moral barrier, all these variously unhappy, insecure and dadless males – Spider-Man, Harry, Electro – are pretty much on the same team. It is the women who are alien, and Gwen provides the real clash of opposition. It is her that Parker feels he must stay away from, because he once made a promise to Gwen's dad to protect her by staying out of her life, and it is Gwen who at first angrily breaks up with Peter.

Their scenes together are easily the best moments in the film. From the first, Gwen is more serious than Peter, and simply smarter. His bedroom is littered with slightly callow cultural stuff – posters for Blow-Up and Dogtown and Z Boys, and a copy of (inevitably) Infinite Jest. We don't see Gwen's room, but she is the one with the academic attainment, having been offered the possibility of studying medicine at Somerville College, Oxford, an event that is to trigger a further crisis in their already tempestuous relationship. When Peter and Gwen avoid some bad guys in the Oscorp building (Harry's corporate HQ) and duck into a broom cupboard, Peter drolly whispers that this is a cliched peril location, and Gwen acidly replies: "Well, I'm sorry I didn't take us to the Bahamas of hiding places!" It's a really nice moment, and the line feels improvised and relaxed, as if Garfield and Stone really were just making it up, like real people.

Garfield is a likable Peter Parker and his face has a cartoony, almost Muppety look, with its shock of hair sticking up; his simply drawn mouth and puppyish eyes showing us his excitement and inner turmoil, and the unibrow periodically becoming a circumflex of sadness. He is a very young-looking 30 years old, a convincing high school graduate and contemporary of Gwen's (Emma Stone is 25) although as before, the onward march of time means that this lucrative Spider-Man franchise might soon need to be re-cast and re-launched just as we were getting used to it. (The grizzled Robert Downey Jr, on the other hand, could carry on playing Iron Man for years.)

Gwen isn't given much space to develop, but Emma Stone's sharp, witty presence – and her chemistry with Garfield – is such that the role manages to be more than what was in the script. It exceeds the sum of its screentime minutes. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 almost succeeds in being something interesting and unusual for a superhero movie: a love story.

 

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