The most recent Spider-Man reboot series is so far following the same tack as the Captain America films. Where the first film was the same old over CGI-ed mess, this one has a bit more heart and soul, even though it's inherently limited by still being a comic book movie.

Spider-man (Garfield – scarily reminiscent off Hayden Christensen in both look and some terrible acting at times) is happily fighting crime in between trying to graduate high school and romance his flame Gwen Stacy (Stone) when the new Big Villainous Threat comes along.

In fact more than one, as his old friend Harry Osborn (Dehaan, kind of floundering trying to wield the appropriate gravity for the role) teams up with a guy Max (Foxx) who becomes some kind of living electrical energy field and whose weapon is basically Force Lighting – wonder if Marvel were hoping nobody noticed?

As Electro gains in power and Harry conspires to unleash him on the city to capture Spider-man – whose blood sample he needs to save his life – Peter gets closer to the mystery of what happened to his parents and why they abandoned him as a toddler and wrestles with his feelings for Gwen, whom he's convinced he'll lose simply because he loves her.

It's all very superhero-ey stuff but the one element that will make you sit up and take notice is the unexpected death of a very major character. It's something you never used to see in popular movies, and my theory is that it's the influence of high quality TV talking. Audiences of Game Of Thrones, The Walking Dead and Breaking Bad are now used to suckerpunch shock deaths of headline characters, and movie screenwriters know they have nowhere else to go to retain the 'bigness' of their ideas.