One cynical reaction to Sony's reboot of Spiderman is that its simply to keep the rights in their hands.
Following the dreary disaster of Spiderman 3 that saw sufficient to dismiss Tobey Maguire from the red and blue suit, and Sam Raimi from the director's chair, there had been a thought that Marvel would reclaim the character for possible use in the Avengers series.
Instead, Sony opted to continue their contractual obligation to push out Spiderman movies by the boat load. Which means here we are with what, at first glance, seems to include one of the reasons Spiderman 3 was a bust.
One of the many failings of Spiderman 3 was an overload of villains, with the underwritten Sandman, unfocused New Goblin and underplayed Venom being Spidey's enemies, and neither of which matched the superb performance of Doctor Octopus from Spiderman 2.
Yet as well as following that lead, Sony seem ready to attempt to bleed characters for its own version of Marvel's Avengers universe. 3rd and 4th Amazing Spiderman movies, a Venom movie and a movie based on Spiderman villains club The Sinister Six are all greenlit.
At least you get that impression from the trailers and post adverts that this is going to be a big villain dogpile, with Electro (Jamie Foxx), Green Goblin (Dane DeHaan) and Rhino (Paul Giamatti) all mentioned.
The latter, however, is not involved at all save for cameos at the start and end, while the transformation from Harry Osborn to Green Goblin takes a long time.
The film begins with a flashback to the death of Spidey's parents (Campbell Scott and Embeth Davidtz) in a plane crash, before Spiderman (Andrew Garfield) makes his entrance in a whizz of red and blue stopping a bad man stealing a truck of nuclear materials.
But all is not happy on planet Spiderman, with his relationship with Gwen Stacey (Emma Stone) strained after his promise to keep her safe from New York's surge of supervillains by leaving her.
Within a few bars, they begin a standard cliche on-off thing. But before long (i.e. quite a while down the line - this is a 2hr25 minute film) trouble lurks.
During the initial chase, Spiderman saved an Oscorp engineer called Max Dillon from being squished by the convoy of a hijacked nuclear material wagon and about 45 NYPD cars. Dillon duly becomes obsessed with Spiderman, including an amusing two-and-fro discussion with Gwen in a lift, but his birthday duly gets marred with him being made to stay behind and fix a faulty electric tank in a development lab.
Needless to say, things don't end well, and he duly winds up with glowing blue skin, electricity flowing through his veins and a thirst for power. He duly arrives in Times Square, which leads to him becoming annoyed with Spiderman for some reason or other and duly has a fight amidst collapsing video billboards and full-on slowed-down Matrix-y moments in a huge spectacular that's probably where most of the reported $200million budget went.
This desire for big budget explosions and the like seems to be deployed more than in the recent one, which was primarily focused on the central Peter Parker-Gwen Stacey coupling and largely ignored its fairly perfunctory villain.
Garfield does at least look more settled this time. In the first one, he seemed to be trying to adjust to the red and blue spandex, and failed to convince at times that he was a high school graduate. This time, he looks a lot more relaxed, and easily happy to wise-crack his way around beating villains.
You get the feeling that, at times, Marc Webb wanted to make another 500 Days of Summer with superheroes as its charismatic leads. That may have been interesting to watch, not least given it provided the more interesting moments in the first outing of this cast.
There is interest here - he wants to continue being a web-slinging wisecracker vigilante that the unseen editor of The Daily Bugle newspaper (one of the things this is missing from the 2002-07 films), she wants to move to England and study molecular medicine at Oxford University, he keeps seeing her dead father haunting him, she just wants to get on with life.
But as much is spent on the villains, although the motivations of Electro aren't really pointed out. More is played on the transformation of Harry Osborn, who discovers he shares a genetic wasting disease that turned his legendary scientist father green in death.
His transformation is more interesting to follow than that of Electro, even if he is the more menacing villain for the majority of the piece. It details father-son issues, a rekindling of a friendship with Parker, and desperation, which eventually leads to his villainry in a more plausible manner.
Plausibility is often played for in the movies like this that, although you'd imagine a hi-tech research corporation like the continually incapable Oscorp would be less vulnerable to be broken into and taken over on several occasions. There is much here that keeps in the important stuff about genetic research - after all, Spiderman wouldn't be around without it - but it also remarks its not a very stable company with such important stuff riding on it.
The final act of the film is the most interesting and most spoiler-y. It certainly sets up the scope for Garfield to show off his full dramatic range in heavier doses, which is an interesting end to the 2hr20 of assorted moods that it took to reach it. It was certainly an interesting plot point to set number 3 up.
This film does at least go further to answer the question if there is a point to a re-booted Spiderman within the decade that saw the man's first big screen adaptation. But it still struggles to juggle a dense and at times silly script with all the moods expected of it, which leads to things being confused at times.
Still, we can expect the studio's contractual obligations to see another go at getting it right in two years time.
3/5
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