Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on April 2014

Director Martin Webb’s second Spider-Man outing very cleverly (not to mention profitably) combines the superhero and young adult genres. It shakes some of the first film’s sense of redundancy, representing as that film did a reboot of the webslinger franchise a mere 10 years after Sam Raimi’s superior efforts began. Still, it feels a bit rushed and spends more time, especially in the third act, on setting up the next sequel than on the story at hand. Tonally it’s all over the place, jerking around from high-octane action set pieces to emotional angst-lite to wisecracking comedy to deep tragedy. And there are way too many supervillain threads. But on the plus side, the SFX are top-drawer, the energy and chemistry between Andrew Garfield and real-life squeeze Emma Stone is intuitive and unforced, and Dane DeHaan (Chronicle), channeling a young Leonardo DiCaprio, makes a hell of a lot better Harry Osborne than James Franco did. Jamie Foxx does some super-pissed-off villain duty as an iridescent “Electro,” the result of an inadvertent dip in a giant tank of electric eels. Gotta watch that. Overall an entertaining few fanboy hours at the movies. (141 min)