With a dull story and lame script, sadly not that amazing

Rating: 4/10 (22 April 2014)

The are many bad things in this world, and one of them is those occasions in which we find somebody or something saying/doing a lot but really not saying/doing anything at all â€“ Marc Webb's follow up to his surprisingly great popcorn adventure from 2012 is sadly one of those such occasions. Upon conclusion of this 130 minute plus blast of hot air it becomes clear that the hope we had with the reboot of an already new franchise is now sadly hanging in the balance of movie purgatory, a place that is neither here nor there and a place where we the audience now will find it hard to care what else this franchise has to offer.
Webb's 2012 film benefited greatly from a fresh sense of direction that Webb harnessed to great use in his breakout movie 500 Days of Summer, but here just a few years on the direction and pace of this "amazing" adventure feels well and truly drained of its power. As mentioned in the opening the film exists to cover ground that has been covered before and makes this venture seriously hard to warm to when so many words and scenarios are playing out for playing-out's sake. With Webb's direction feeling now lacklustre the bad mojo spreads to his cast in particular Andrew Garfield who gets lost in a movie that his natural charm can't escape from, his Spider-Man and Peter Parker that showed youthful enthusiasm in the first is here nothing more than a wisecracking, sulky mess that makes you wonder if we should actually even like him, although the story Garfield has been placed in is so overplayed now over all these incarnations that it could just be fatigue from over familiarity that even the introduction of two new villains cant solve.
Jamie Foxx coming off his most beloved film Django Unchained was a hot casting choice as the sorry and powerful Electro while Dane DeHaan so good in Chronicle and The Place Beyond the Pines was also a score for the movie's casting, but both man sadly don't get much shift with a particular wasting of Foxx. Foxx's dweebish Max Dillon is neither scary or human enough to be memorable and he does overplay the outsider nature of the character to unbelievable levels, while DeHaan has small moments, his Harry Osborn is perhaps being saved for later entries to shine truly. The ensemble as a whole here feels weak which is a shame, an indictment backed up the fact Paul Giamatti who appears for 5 or so minutes seems far more interesting.
Without a real stand-out action piece, and with far too much exposition that has been covered before this Amazing movie feels anything but. For a film with a $200 million budget and with talent in all departments it's a real shame that it turned out to be the movie that it is, although with 5 separate Spider-Man films now done and dusted, one must wonder if there is anything that could make this blockbuster staple truly jaw dropping again.
This particular reviewer would be leaning towards the answer of highly doubtful.
2 mid air data transfers out of 5
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