We all know being a superhero is a bore. The burden is back-breaking and the saviour complex is persistent, not to mention the trauma that comes with the job and the perennial threats to girlfriends.
The snag reached a zenith, or a nadir, in the influential and much-admired The Dark Knight trilogy, so when Andrew Garfield came along in 2012 as Peter Parker in the rebooted and re-attitudinised The Amazing Spider-Man, the new franchise brought the feeling that being special could also be a joy. Discovering that you can shoot webs from your wrists is nuts, it certainly affects your mental health, but let’s admit it, it’s also super fun.
That’s the previous movie. In the second film of the new trilogy, a re-tweaking of a re-tweak of an old franchise — how long they’ll keep this up I sometimes wonder — Peter, or Garfield, proudly sports that college-boy exuberance and an annoying knack for one-liners even as the inevitable darker clouds roll in. It’s fate: sooner or later, all superheroes brood. So while the new film confirms that The Amazing Spider-Man is a mutant misadventure/teen rom-com geared towards young, teenaged crowds, the playbook of the chosen one’s suffering and trauma descends on him — and almost spoils the fun.
When he’s not web-slinging through the gaps of Manhattan edifices, Spidey is torn between his love for high school sweetheart Gwen (Emma Stone) and his fear for her safety. He’s also haunted by the death of his father and the mysterious legacy left to him in a brown bag full of papers. In short, a spectrum of teen angst that can be cured by intensifying his crime-fighting vigilantism. And if you’ve seen Sam Raimi’s early 2000s trilogy, an assault of déjà vu is palpable here. Spider-Man is up against the nefarious Oscorp and a monstrous, electricity-hungry and bio-bastardised Electro (Jamie Foxx, nibbled by electric eels). Things get more complicated with Oscorp chief being Harry Osborn, Peter’s childhood friend (played with devilish relish by Dane De Haan, reprising the role played by James Franco). In other words, the same story retold with a different sensibility and catalogue of monsters.
Garfield — somehow less charismatic than when we saw him in The Social Network — is still appealing enough as the cocky Peter who dishes out punchlines and revels in Times Square-worthy showmanship (when Tobey Maguire played the part, he made Spider-Man an insecure, vulnerable hero with an identity crisis). His romantic dilemma with Gwen is the central drama that the film devotes much time for; it’ll make a lot of people swoon, or it’ll have others counting seconds for Electro to re-appear and smash a few buildings up, because that’s certainly more exciting.
That the teen romance is a thrust of the characters is fine enough; it’s just that the film comes alive, charged with verve, movement and creativity, only when Garfield (or his stand-in) disappears inside the spandex and starts to web-crawl. The comic book universe is vast and bottomless — it’ll take years for studios to plumb its roster of mutants, half-breeds and tortured souls in costume waiting in there. For us on this side, the superhero movies still have some juice left, though it’s hard to say how much. New releases of Iron Man, Superman, Spider-Man, Thor, and other comic-book escapades have begun to feel like a global pop-culture ritual: the whole world feels like having to see them despite knowing they’re more of the same, the pills that everybody takes, that satisfy but aren't particularly enriching. Marc Webb, who directed the two Amazing Spider-Man films, is effective and serviceable. He doesn’t have the visionary bravura of Josh Whedon (of The Avengers, the next part arrives next year) or the brash kinetic instinct of JJ Abrams (of Star Trek, and helming the new Star Wars right now). What we have here is a fun, cool and overlong film that we have no problem enjoying while it’s playing, only for it to fade quickly from memory like a cobwebbed past that holds no importance.
