His aunt (Sally Field) clucks and frets about his dirty clothes, untidy room and failure to wash his face as if she is appearing in a washing powder commercial. He is politically aware (there is a poster of Aung San Suu Kyi), likes art house movies (he has a picture of Blow Up) and is keen on skate boarding. The clues to his character are stuck on his bedroom wall. The half-hearted references to Spider-Man’s “vigilante” behaviour and his dark side are thoroughly unconvincing.Īs played by Garfield, Peter Parker is a lanky, likable young adult with a hint of Andy Murray about him. The scenes in which Spider-Man rescues passers-by from collisions and crashes on the streets of New York could be cut and pasted from any earlier film featuring the webbed crusader. The back-story about Parker’s parents is sketched in perfunctory fashion. We’ve seen the same kind of fights on planes countless times before. This is staged effectively enough but is utterly unoriginal. Just as in The Dark Knight Rises (2012), we are treated to an aerial prelude. When Gwen tells Peter, “you’re Spider-Man and I love that but I love Peter Parker more,” she is expressing a sentiment that Webb clearly shares.Īlmost every sequence and set-up here seems familiar from some earlier super-hero film. On the other, Webb is duty-bound to include, almost by rote at times, the action sequences that come with a franchise like this. In Andrew Garfield (Peter Parker/Spider-Man) and Emma Stone (Gwen Stacy), he has two very engaging leads with the same wisecracking, offbeat quality as Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the young lovers in that film. On the one hand, he wants to make a quirky romantic drama in the vein of his own 2009 indie hit, 500 Days Of Summer. There is a sense throughout that director Marc Webb is being pulled in very different directions. This certainly isn’t a patch on the recently released Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Unfortunately, though, for all its attractive elements, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is hoary, unconvincing fare. You can’t help but admire the skill with which the best of the films combine spectacle, humour and characterisation. These studios have continually found ingenious new ways to tell us stories that we’ve been told countless times before. One of the wonders of modern-day Hollywood is the immense amount of mileage the US studios have been able to crank out of super-hero films.

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