The Amazing Spider-Man 2: Rise of Electro is one of those rare movies to opt for a soft open abroad before its US release, so I got to see it a week before y’all. Yay for me, I guess? I won’t spoil anything for you, unless you consider “it’s not very good” to be a spoiler.
Unlike its predecessor, which was essentially a remake of a movie that was only 10 years old, Amazing Spider-Man 2 is not completely pointless out of the gate. It at least has the opportunity to tell a story we haven’t seen on film before. And all comic book movie sequels benefit from not needing to spend the whole first act on the origin story. But Amazing Spider-Man 2 squanders that advantage with indulgent origin stories for two of the three (!) supervillains in the piece (alongside various goons within the evil Oscorp empire. Like the terrible third installment of the last Spider-Man franchise, Rise of Electro goes for quantity in lieu of quality with its antagonists).
We spend a good bit of time with Jamie Foxx’s Max Dillon before he becomes Electro, and he’s unfortunately one of those “aren’t socially awkward geeks THE WORST and also probably mentally unstable?” characters in a movie that only exists because of a massive fanbase of geeks (some of whom may be socially awkward and/or mentally unstable. I’m all three and I have yet to become a supervillain). And Foxx just isn’t convincing as a socially awkward geek, even with every nerd alert! cliché imaginable up to and including a pocket protector:
Becoming an electricity-controlling villain doesn’t make the character any more interesting. He suffers from the Green Lantern problem of showing little creativity in exercising his phenomenal powers. Dude can decorporealize into electric energy and he pretty much just makes lightning bolts. Electro could be completely eliminated from the movie, and it would still be long enough and have sufficient plot. That’s not a good place to be with your main villain and the subject of your film’s subtitle. (Contrast Captain America 2‘s Winter Soldier, who despite not having much screen time is the catalyst for the highest emotional stakes in the film; and finds more ways to be creatively violent with just super strength and a metal arm than Electro does with godlike powers.)
Somewhat less bland is Harry Osborn, even though he’s one of the recycled bits from Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films. Now, Reader, I must confess that around midway through Dane DeHaan’s first scene as Harry, with the same old “poor little rich boy” daddy issues but with a comb-overed rat weasel in the place of James Franco, I turned to my viewing companion and whispered, “I miss the hot one.”
But as soon as DeHaan shared the screen with Andrew Garfield, I wanted to take it all back. Reconnecting with childhood friend Peter, Harry gets much-needed dimension by having something to do other than pout. To my astonishment, the comb-overed rat weasel started to charm me! It helps that DeHaan and Garfield’s chemistry is second only to Garfield and Stone’s, who are ACTUALLY IN LOVE.
So even when Harry went back to his busy moping and raging schedule, I delighted in DeHaan’s scenery-chewing hyperdrama. He stopped looking so much like a weasel and more like a young Leonardo DiCaprio. Could this dude end up on the countless teen girls’ bedroom walls?
My reversal regarding Dane DeHaan reminded me how nice it must be to be a dude actor and not have to be particularly attractive to succeed. Emma Stone is fantastic and all, but maybe there’s a rat-faced Gwen Stacy out there who would have really blown the doors off?
And it’s possible DeHaan was only so interesting to me because I was desperate for something to sustain me through the interminable 142 minutes of this movie. I would have rather spent that time watching that clip of Emma Stone lip synching 57 times in a row, and I suggest you do the same.
Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town. She cannot do whatever a spider can.
