Stupid. BUT...!

Rating: 8/10 (17 May 2014)

Hell, I've seen worse movies than that and watched them a second time.
It had some charms. Granted, there were some stupid bits, but it was flying by so fast I could hardly tell. I liked the wisecracks, found the romance touching, loved the special effects for Electro. Electro's motivation was, I admit, stupid. And I'm not seeing the 'bitten by a radioactive eel' thing. The 3D worked. I finally just forgot about it while it, probably, increased the impact. The way they portrayed the action was effective and creative. The slo- mo and magnifications were mixed in smoothly. The immense time at Gwen's grave-site was corny and childish and stupid. But it is, after all, a Marvel comic, built on melodrama wrought up so large it becomes physical. And the acting/writing choice of making him perky and quippy first time back in the field was stupid. He was weird about giving his blood. And Osborne was inexplicably urgent about a disease that apparently wouldn't kill him till he was what, in his fifties? The rhino suit was cool looking, and I loved the glimpses of suits for Vulture and Dr. Octopus.
I think they should give up on their rule about living in a world of ordinary physics. They don't seem to be able to stick to it anyway. This world should have rare but real magic, like in the Marvel comics. That might work better for Rhino than a suit with inexhaustible ammo and an inexplicable horn. Besides, why armour up a man so big, when a tank already works great?
Electro is pretty tough to justify. We want to personify electricity, so it has to be science-y. I like the new version where he can exist as an invisible field, and pass through wires. So, I'm thinking maybe some science-y blather about figuring out how to store information in electrons for computing, and how they can program it to manipulate the electrons' positions. That kind of breaks the science, so pass over that quickly. So then some desperate scientist stores his own mind in electricity, but it goes horribly awry, driving him insane. He could have some sort of sad quest to re-build his own body. Still, that might be too much power. He could, after all, just lay back and manipulate the energy in a person's brain a little bit to kill them instantly and quietly. Why lob around big blasts?
To be honest, as a story, it is a 6, but the budget, direction, and rarity, raise it up.