The Amazing Spider-Man 2: Rise of Electro

Every comic book movie faces the same challenge when going up on the big screen, to stay faithful to the original comic or to appeal to the sensibilities of modern cinema, and The Amazing Spider-Man 2: Rise of Electro comes up firmly on the side of the comic books.

While the original Amazing Spider-Man faltered, not quite finding the right balance between its origins and the "realistic" stories current cinema seems to be enamored with, this film is much more successful in establishing tone.

TAS:ROE picks up roughly a year or so after the last film, with Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) fighting street thugs and Russian mobsters while graduating from his final year of high-school.

Luckily the film skips right to the graduation because watching Peter Parker doing his juggling act of school/personal life/superherodom yet again is probably more than the audience would have been able to take.

Insert "catching the bus" pun here.

Things are also complicated with his girlfriend Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) because Peter promised her dying father that he would stay away from her. However, a promise from a teenager to stay away from another teenager who is attracted to them goes about as well as you'd think.

Anyway, the cartoonishly evil Oscorp has ostensibly shut down all of the human/animal hybrids from the last movie, but continue to run the rest of their projects with hilarious mad scientistry.

"We here at Oscorp employ only the highest quality shady scientists and the most innocent ingenues" 

One day Max Dillon (Jamie Foxx), an electrical engineer and massive Spider-Man fanboy who works at Oscorp, gets into an accident involving apparently magical electric eels which turn him into an energy being with the power to absorb and manipulate electricity instead of a boring old corpse.

He's like a mix of Dr Manhattan and a Dalek

Things are further complicated when Peter's old friend Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan) returns to the city to inherit his father's company.

He's a cute kid, but he has TERRIBLE taste in friends. 

Maybe the appearance of an old friend is exactly what Peter Parker needs, providing Peter with emotional support and backing that support up with a multi-billion dollar trust fund.

Nah.

Like...really terrible taste in friends.

Garfield continues to be an adequate Spider-Man, despite looking more and more like a 30-year-old man. He's nailed the whole "dual persona" - energetic and witty when wearing the suit, awkward and almost subdued when not.

Emma Stone has great chemistry (science pun) with all her cast members, pulling out all the stops to seem like the most level-headed person in a film that features science so soft you could spread it on your morning toast.

Because having a girlfriend works out so well for most superheroes. Just ask Batman.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 dives gleefully into the comic book aesthetic and tone, ramping up the mid-combat dialogue, the cheesy dialogue, and the design of villains.

The film finds a good equilibrium between action and advancement of the plot, and the action is changed up from scene-to-scene retaining a feeling of creativity between each foe.

With the origin movie out of the way, the film feels like it can resolve existing plots and set up future story lines significantly easier, and makes for a nice comparison to Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

They tied up the "Spider-Man's career as a firefighter" arc really quickly

While the CGI can be jarring, the score is fantastic and drags the audience in, especially during Electro's scenes.

It's a vast improvement on The Amazing Spider-Man and sets up a lot of interesting things for the future.

Even though they do the whole "nice costume" gag yet again.
Seriously, is it a requirement for every Spider-Man movie to have one?

Recommended.

"Now don't you go falling into a tank of magic eels later today!"