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"Amazing" Grates

The good news is that "The Amazing Spider-Man 2", the sequel to the premature reboot of the web-slinging franchise, is freed from the shackles of Spidey's origin story. The bad news is that Sam Raimi's trilogy is still so recent that this franchise continues to exists in its shadow. 2012's "The Amazing Spider-Man" simply didn't make enough of an impact to wipe the slate clean and, as a result, there's some cognitive dissonance to watching the film. A quick opening flashback plays like a "previously on" segment and helps a bit, but Norman Osborne, for example, is still so indelibly Willem Dafoe.

"The Amazing Spider-Man 2" explores the origins of Electro (Jamie Foxx) and the burgeoning love between Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy (Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone). Electro is born from Max Dillion, an electrical engineer at Oscorp who runs afoul of some electric eels and becomes a kind of superhuman power station. His journey from ignored nerd and spider-fan to super-villain and spider-foe is fairly rote. All the typical notes are hit: the misunderstanding, the betrayal, the deal with the devil. Mr. Foxx adds as much depth as he can to the role, though he's more or less painting by numbers. A brief partnership with the ill-fated Harry Osborne (Dane DeHaan, looking and acting like a young Leonardo DiCaprio) shows promise but ends almost as quickly as it begins.

The visual design of the Electro character is beautiful, as is most of the film. Special effects seem to improve with each successive Spider-Movie, and this one is no different. In IMAX 3D, the scenes of Spider-Man swinging through Manhattan are some of the most vivid and impressive yet. And watching him dodge Electro's lightning bolts makes you believe you'd need spider sense to stay alive. Director Marc Webb is still uncomfortable with action scenes - occasionally he'll cut to something exploding or getting crushed but it's hard to know why - and he doesn't possess Mr. Raimi's gifts for grandeur or, apparently, humor. Still, there's enough eye candy that you won't mind.

Meanwhile, Peter and Gwen are graduating high school and dealing with the typical drama: boy meets girl, boy makes promise to girl's dead father to stay away from girl, girl gets scholarship to England. You know, the usual. Mr. Garfield and Ms. Stone have a casual, improvised banter that is instantly likable, though it can't sustain a film of this length. At almost two and a half hours, this "Spider-Man" suffers from the kind of bloating that seems to plague most tentpole films of late. For some reason, every blockbuster needs to be an epic endurance test, but this script - by Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and Jeff Pinkner - doesn't have the elegance or depth to earn its running time (as something like "The Dark Knight" did, for example).  I suppose it's ironic that the film opens with a shot of wristwatch and ends with a climax at a clock tower. The audience doesn't need to be reminded of the time. They can feel it passing.