With the great power of unlimited Marvel cash, comes the great responsibility of carrying a franchise along, of establishing new characters while solving old conflicts, and of setting up new plot strands for future installments. Such is the burden of these modern superhero extravaganzas; the good ones though, like last April’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier, make the hefty balancing act look easy.

Amazing 2 is a flick of many scenes, but little structure, a picture of much action, but no actual plot. The film, like the original Amazing, feels messily designed, a miscellany of scenes rather than a cohesive entity. Also, unlike a couple of the previous Sam Raimi directed Spider-Man’s,which had particular journeys for the hero at the heart of it, Amazing 2 never has anything worthwhile to tell. Director Marc Webb, along with his screenwriters,rarely offer up any new understandings of its main characters as they are instead shuffled around for the purpose of keeping the franchise moving. There’s no tonal consistency present either, with Webb stumbling clumsily from farcical and quippy comedy to ominous drama to extreme tragedy in short periods of time, thus undermining all three tones by the end. The scenes Webb clearly feels most comfortable directing though involves the main heroes of Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) and Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield). Their relationship feels intimate and the two fine actors have an undeniable chemistry that brings the film some much needed humanity. Although, as wonderful as Stone and Garfield are together, they cannot be saved from the lazy script; the dialogue often not affording their storyline proper justice.

At the beginning, Parker’s nemeses show legitimate promise, but quickly they lose any understandable coherence or motivation. Jamie Foxx plays the big bad of the film: Needy nobody Max Dillon, an engineer at the Oscorp company, who starts out as a worthy object of the audience’s sympathy, a lonely and lowly laborer. However, when the man falls into a vat of modified electric eels and is reborn as the voltage-firing adversary Electro, his path and motivation towards vengeance against Parker seems artificial and emotionally aloof. Unfortunately, the same results are seen with Dane DeHaan’s character of Harry Osborne, a childhood friend to Parker and the disturbed heir to the Oscorp company. DeHaan, a gifted and rising star is wasted here as well, his character shows signs of interesting menace and helpless pathos, but eventually and inexplicably winds up warped by science and hubris into the bizarrely evil and rabid Green Goblin. Both villains don’t offer much in the way of originality or emotional stimulation, and only seem to add on to the already long list of the movie’s subplots.

Like so many others, Amazing 2, cannot rise above the usual blockbuster mediocrity of our time. It’s bloated, full of missed opportunities, and subject to simply too much studio oversight. Never does Peter Parker’s (Andrew Garfield) story ever feel real or important, but instead it’s ever-calculated and entangled with the movie’s corporate overlords. Save for a very moving third act turn, Amazing 2 offers nothing new or intellectually stimulating as the heroic figure of Spider-Man seems but a cog in the constant and exhausting studio machine. In this age where superhero franchises and summer tentpole films serve as the studio’s biggest players, a huge profit is demanded, and there’s no way that budgets so massive would be spent passionately, on faith. Altogether, Amazing 2 has completely no reason to exist, yet it hits all its marks. No fanboy will ignore it, no studio executive will be run out of his or her job, and no innovation will be pursued.

Grade: D+