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

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… Read full this story

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