The second of Marc Webb’s reboot of the Spider-Man franchise starts shortly after the events in the previous film. Spider-Man (Andrew Garfield) is a superhero-about-town, trying to balance his heroics with his relationships with Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) and Aunt May (Sally Field). Peter’s childhood friend Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan) is determined to find a cure for his mysterious illness and discovers that old experiments conducted by Peter’s deceased father (Campbell Scott) created the spiders that gave Peter his powers and may also save Harry. Around the same time, oddball electrician Max Dillon (Jamie Foxx) gets shot with a zillion bolts of electricity and falls into a tank of electric eels and is turned into Electro, a mentally unstable human lightning bolt. Garfield is a more relaxed and much funnier Peter Parker, and his dialogue with Stone is so sweet, wry and believable that I wished Webb had directed them in a romantic comedy instead of a superhero film.
