Is The Amazing Spider-Man 2 The Worst Marvel Movie Ever?

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2: RISE OF ELECTRO

The preposterous 2012 reboot of Spider-Man - which came merely five years after Sam Raimi's prior Spidey trilogy came to a close - was met with the rolling of eyes by anyone over the age of 20, but box-office-bonanza enthusiasm of those under. In fact, the very existence of The Amazing Spider-Man - the start of a quadrilogy(!) helmed by Marc Webb, a guy whose 'videography' is filled with pop-promos for the very worst American music of the 21st century (Good Charlotte! Puddle Of Mudd! P.O.D.! Hoobastank! Jesse McCartney! Hilary Duff! Ashlee Simpson! Fergie! Pussycat Dolls!) - could be justified by this teenaged demographic: both in the opportunity to appeal to it, and to keep its title character ensconced within it.

Pulling the wool over Aunt May's eyes - again.

Peter Parker is Marvel's adolescent eternal: high-school kid turned cadet photographer; guilt-riddled and self-loathing and wracked with existential insecurities. He's emo as fuck, basically, and the origin-minting screenplay of Webb's new 'visioning' took this literally: turning Parker into Andrew Garfield's beanie-sportin' sk8r boi, who, true to his teenaged ways, is 90% sarcastic and 10% hysterical-proclamations-of-undying-love-on-top-of-a-bridge; his misadventures fighting crime whilst trying to pull the wool over Aunt Sally Field's eyes making for explicit homage to that patron saint of recalcitrant schoolboy hijinks, Ferris Bueller.

Taking its cues from its hero, The Amazing Spider-Man 2: Rise Of Electro (it hurt me more than it hurt you to have to type that) is pitched at an adolescent tenor: emotions and explosions forever bigger; daddy-issues-hand wringing and bouncing-off-buildings each more extreme; and the tone of the constant comedy ever zanier.

Sort that hair out Foxx - PRONTO!

When trying to stop mutant Russian mobsters or Jamie Foxx's after-the-semi-colon villain from razing the entirety of New York, Spidey is like a cartoon let loose on real-life buildings; crackin' wise, whistling, and exquisitely-trolling like some super-heroic Woody Woodpecker. Foxx is given a comb over and a wacky musical sting; Garfield and Emma Stone occasionally get to do screwball (or at least a tepid blockbuster take thereon); Paul Giamatti less chews the scenery than tries to cram whole CGI cityscapes into his maw; Marton Csokas's high-camp Evil German Scientist is as subtle in its mincing as '70s sketch-comedy; and Dane DeHaan's smug prick seems to be smirking at the shittiness of the movie itself.

At a few blessed moments, it feels as if Webb shares that same sense of self-mockery; that he's willingly tapped into the idiocy of a movie about a teenager in lycra playing vigilante by swinging off skyscrapers, and has treated it with the complete lack of gravity and reverence it deserves. Witness: the instance where crowds of onlookers stand happily by, mere feet from an automatic-weaponfire shoot-out between Crazy Russians in tanks and police-cars as far as the eyes can see. Instead of worrying about NOT GETTING SHOT, they stand mouth agape, and hoot and holler when our hero shows up. Often, Rise Of Electro has the tenor of professional wrestling; a persistent sense that crests in a mid-Times-Square scene in which Foxx transforms from confused, Frankensteinian outcast to evil villain with the relish of a boo-courting heel-turn.

I'm just gonna pout while you kids save the world and stuff.

Yet, maybe willing yourself to believe that there's ironic intentionality to this calamitous cacophony of a cash-cow is probably just a coping mechanism. Is a way to survive a movie in which hundreds of thousands of people are killed in the background to little dramatic concern; in which a guy stalking his ex-girlfriend is the height of romance; in which the Sony logo appears more than Spider-Man himself; in which the soundtrack brings together Hans Zimmer, Pharrell, and nu-metal in some audio hell.

By the time you get to the spoiler-alert big-tragic-emo-death climax, that once-tendency towards self-mockery is abandoned for wild soap-opera, and you just want the thing to end already. Only it staggers on, undying, rambling out to 140 messy minutes, with a bunch of storylines inserted just for foreshadowing to future sequels, spin-offs, and other iterations of run-amok Marvel branding. When people complain of Hollywood movies being brainless special-effects spectacles that are loud, incoherent, and idiotic, Rise Of Electro is the exact kind of crap they're describing.