Hans Zimmer’s score for “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” is as bombastic as usual, and yet all I heard was the sound of paychecks being cashed by everyone going through the motions for this perfunctory sequel. It’s as much computer program as movie.
Trudging from cack-handed melodrama to the kind of low comedy you expect from an 80s comic-book movie or a second-tier franchise like “Fantastic Four,” this one features Jamie Foxx as a John Hinckley-ish stalker-nerd who worships Spider-Man but, as happens in so many office buildings these days, gets both electrocuted and thrown into an eel tank at the same time. Where are the superheroes of OSHA when you need them?
Spidey (Andrew Garfield) and Gwen (Emma Stone) break up because he promised her late dad he’d keep his sticky palms off her, but it’s hard to take their parting seriously when you know they’ll reunite in a couple of scenes, as they indeed do. These two actors have the kind of sparks you’ll remember from your most awkward job interview.
Each of them smiles hugely to cover for the lameness of the tragic banter that is the calling card of the transgalactic hacks Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, the screenwriters who belong back in B-TV like “Alias” and “Xena: Warrior Princess.”
This is the kind of movie where the bad guy asks a question and then whistles the “Jeopardy” theme, right after he says, “My, oh my, how the tables have turned!” Where Foxx’s villain, dubbed Electro after he turns into a human Taser, says, “It’s time to meet your destiny.”
Then, preparing to spray high voltage all over Times Square, “It’s my birthday, now it’s time for me to light my candles!” Which is not the only reason Electro reminded me of Schwarzenegger’s Mr. Freeze. Alex, Rob: At the banquet of Hollywood, you’re the Cheez Whiz.
Taking over for James Franco as Harry Osborn is the blanched 100-pound sylph Dane DeHaan. Despite his Hitler haircut, he’s less scary than annoying, like a postal clerk or an eighth-grade hall monitor. Harry and Spidey’s alter ego Peter Parker are old buddies, but Harry has the same disease that killed his father and hopes to get some of that experimental Spidey-blood to save his life. Which means, naturally, that he’ll have to get his Green Goblin on, far too late in the movie, with his big rumpus thrown in as one of five or so endings.
Oh, and every few scenes we plod through some more unnecessary backstory about Peter’s dad (Campbell Scott), the renegade scientist who came up with the Spidey serum in the first place.
Garfield, a smarmy Brit trying to do James Dean and Marlon Brando, instead comes off like a young Eric Roberts, jangled and weird. His cockiness is as off-putting as Tobey Maguire’s innocence was endearing, and the writers and director Marc Webb keep ruining the cluttered action scenes with cutesy one-liners that show everything is way too easy for Spider-Man. An early battle with the villain Rhino (a woefully campy Paul Giamatti), in which Spidey has to dodge traffic while catching explosive canisters, turns goofy when he stops to take a whiny call from Gwen at her high-school graduation. If Spider-Man can come up with a line like, “Shake it off, it’s just your bones, your muscles and your organs,” he can’t be that badly hurt, can he?
Even the effects are often lackluster, especially in an insipid, useless closing battle and in a mid-movie spectacle in which Times Square gets destroyed and it looks like the CGI program was set to “rough draft.” Much better, and mildly thrilling, is the battle between Electro and Spidey during a blackout caused by Electro sucking all the power out of the grid.
Their climactic encounter raises the movie to the level of “not a total waste of time” and yields the single emotionally resonant moment, nicely told by Webb (“500 Days of Summer”) in the only few seconds that have any visual poetry whatsoever.
Garbage isn’t quite the word for the rest: garbage isn’t what factories intentionally produce. Cookie-cutter? Nay. Who doesn’t like cookies, or needs two hours and 20 minutes to consume one?
“The Amazing Spider-Man” is more like an old Xerox copy: Greasy, paper-thin, slightly faded, and probably made unnecessarily, but in any case destined to get lost in a pile of things exactly like it.