Slinging it

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 has the air of a movie that knows it doesn’t have to be good. The fans will show up no matter what and do their best to believe that their time and money were well-spent. They may succeed, but the movie doesn’t make it easy.

Andrew Garfield is back as Peter Parker and Spider-Man, as miscast as he was in 2012’s

The Amazing Spider-Man. He slouches again through the role mumbling his lines from behind hunched shoulders, like a James Dean wannabe in some road-company production of Rebel Without a Cause. Only when Peter becomes Spidey does the slouch disappear, subsumed into computer-animated aerial acrobatics of our hero in action.

And is there ever plenty of action. He floats through the air with the greatest of ease, and now those little thingamabobs on his wrists can shoot his web strands for several miles. Spidey flies up, down, back, forth and across at speeds that would yank an ordinary mortal’s arms right out of their shoulder sockets. Occasionally, his movements ramp down into extra-slow motion or even freezes, and the movie, as if to underscore its comic-book origin, gives us a suitable-for-framing moment, like a waiter proffering his restaurant’s dessert tray. As usual with such CGI antics, for all the crashing cars and blazing gunfire, the frantic movement has little weight or sense of real danger. It’s just so much visual noise, blasted at us with such velocity that the 3-D doesn’t have time to register on our optic nerves.

There are four writers credited on the picture: Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and Jeff Pinkner for the screenplay, and those three plus James Vanderbilt for the story. Maybe it’s a case of too many cooks, but there’s really no story here beyond what’s left over from The Amazing Spider-Man. Campbell Scott and Embeth Davidtz return for thankless cameos as the parents of Peter Parker, who left him with his Aunt May and Uncle Ben, then vanished into the night. They’re here again in flashback just long enough to tease us about the mystery of their disappearance, then to be disposed of in a fiery death.

That lingering mystery advances a step or two here, with a plot turn involving an abandoned subway station named Roosevelt that borders on the ridiculous. Otherwise, a half-hour’s worth of story is stretched thinly over 140 minutes. The script is generally composed of mumbo jumbo and double-talk about power grids, DNA, spider venom and the shady doings of the massive Oscorp Industries, founded by the sinister Norman Osborn. Chris Cooper appears in another thankless cameo as Osborn, dying from some mysterious disease (more double-talk here), which he passes on to his son Harry (a boyish Dane DeHaan) along with the corporation.

At times it seems the movie is trying to see how many good actors it can waste the talents of. Garfield, whose ability as an actor remains open to debate, is surrounded by quite a few. Denis Leary returns in several quick, wordless shots as the ghost of police Capt. Stacy, haunting Peter for endangering his daughter Gwen. (As Gwen, Emma Stone is marginally less wasted than in the first film, but there’s still little chemistry with the closed-off Garfield). Sally Field returns to once again to wring her hands as Peter’s Aunt May. Jamie Foxx pops up as a nerdy engineer who dies gruesomely, then is reincarnated as Electro, going inexplicably from worship of Spider-Man to hatred and looking like Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen, retaining little more than Foxx’s voice.

Perhaps most wasted of all is Paul Giamatti, all but unrecognizable behind a shaved dome and a lobotomy-scarred forehead in two quick bits that bookend the movie (I hear there’s a post-credit scene, but only the most ardent fans will stay to see that). Giamatti plays someone named Aleksei Systevich. At the opening, he attempts a robbery of plutonium that’s thwarted by Spider-Man; at the end, he returns in a suit of robot armor cribbed from Sigourney Weaver in Aliens and the Jaegers of Pacific Rim. Any grimacing brute could have played the part—why did they need Giamatti?

Something tells me the answer to that will come in The Amazing Spider-Man 3. I can’t wait.