Sandy Kenyon reviews 'The Amazing Spider-Man 2'

NEW YORK (WABC) -- Spider-Man is back this weekend, and he's expected to have movie-goers flocking to the theaters. But will the sequel live up to the hype that came with the original?

The first film lived up to its name a couple of summers ago, when it grossed three quarters of a billion dollars in the U.S. and Canada. And the sequel is expected to make as much as $100 million in its first weekend of release.

But is it any good?

"The Amazing Spider-Man 2" is best seen on a big screen, the bigger the better, to fully enjoy a thrill ride that begins at the start of the movie and regularly leaves you breathless.

Jamie Foxx's Electro and Dane DeHaan's Green Goblin are both worthy villains, and real-life couple Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone shine as Spider-Man alter ego Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy.

They got together in the previous film, but grow apart in this one.

Stone and Garfield are movie stars who can really act, with terrific chemistry on screen and off, as they've been together for three years now.

The movie is almost worth watching solely to see them share the screen in such an honest way.

"It's like being naked," Garfield said. "It's like being completely exposed in front of

each other."

It's a real pity director Marc Webb has to spend so much of his film setting up future movies in the Marvel Universe. From my point-of-view, Spider-Man was getting steadily less amazing, but high school student Jackie Xerri disagreed, calling her time spent watching the film "the quickest two and half hours" of her life!

The chance to tell the stars what she thought was a priceless opportunity.

"You're bold!" Stone told her, before being asked about stars getting in trouble in this day and age.

"I definitely am still a young person, or I still like to have fun with my friends and things like that," Stone said. "But I'm not really a, I don't like to make choices that would endanger other people or endanger myself, so I just try to stay away from that. And that seems to be a pretty good trick for me."

The fate of Emma Stone's character is determined in the final scene, which would have been more dramatic if it had come a bit sooner, but Jackie disagreed, calling the relationship between Gwen and Peter "genuine and intense."