And at last, the Sinister Six Five are complete!
Electro returns! Brought in from another universe with Doctor Strange's spell, Max Dillon comes back stronger than ever as the electricity-manipulating villain.
It's been four years since Spider-Man: No Way Home came out, and Hasbro has just kept slowly plugging away at toys from it. We got a pretty unimpressive set of figures from it when the movie opened, then the one with all the actors (and two special-release villains) two years after that, and now that another two years have passed, they finally do the last pair of villains - even if Lizard is functionally a re-release of the 2012 figure with an alternate head. If nothing else, we applaud their commitment. Their glacially paced commitment. Their slow, slow commitment.
Sony redesigning Electro for his MCU debut is one of the best things they've ever done. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 version of the character was based on Ultimate Electro, who wore
a black containment suit when he wasn't all powered up, and lacked the iconic 616 Electro mask, instead just having a few small scars on his face. It was a fine, if unremarkable, look in the comics, and it worked in the movie just about as well. But for a movie universe that matters, he deserved more. When he showed up on Earth-199999, he was in his pure energy form, but something about this new world allowed him to re-form his physical body (it's also why his zaps were now yellow instead of blue). Since that meant he was naked, Peter found him some workman's clothes to wear, meaning this figure needs to have a new - and rather detailed - original sculpt.
Reluctant to just send the villains home as they were, Peter tried to find ways to cure or fix them. For Max, that meant safely
draining away all hiw excess electricity, and is why he's got wires all over his body. They're separate pieces, not just sculpted on the surface, but that causes a problem: the bits where they plug into the toy aren't glued in place or anything, because that would make them too immobile and prone to snapping if you moved him wrong. However, those plugs don't want to stay in place even when he's just standing there, so you'll be tempted to glue them yourself. Buuuuuuuut, the wires for some of the sections seem to have been made at the wrong size, so it's a stretch (literally, in a few cases) to get them to where they're supposed to be. So, a nice idea, but a so-so execution.
I tell ya, I wish I loved anything as much as Hasbro loves refusing to pay for the likeness rights of movie villains. The original movie Electro figure wasn't even sculpted to look like a black guy,
let alone Jamie Foxx, and this one has his mask-shaped energy flare covering his face. Sure, this may be a Jamie Foxx sculpt, but it's a Jamie Foxx sculpt in the way NECA's first Casey Jones had an Elias Koteas sculpt: it's there, but it's concealed so they don't have to pay. Legally, there's a difference between "fully accurate sculpt of a human being" and "fully accurate sculpt of a human being, but with a big hole in the center of the face where something can be glued into it." You can tell they didn't pay for likeness rights, because if they had, there'd be an alternate head without the mask. Just making the mask out of electricity is a brilliant way of bringing the comicbook design into the live-action movies, but that doesn't change the fact that Hasbro should have just paid the man.
The articulation is the standard stuff, but like we said, the wires keep it from moving to its fullest potential. And of course there are no shin joints, despite Electro literally having bands around
his shins where the joints could go: always, always, always got to do things the cheapest way imaginable, no matter the consequences. He also gets the same big lightning bolt accessories as She-lectro, and it turns out what we said in that review is wrong: there are clips to properly attach them to the figure, they're just integrated so seamlessly into the sculpt that the only way to spot them is pure luck! Of course, they're sized for her slender girl-arms, not his thick gloves, so we're back to them not fitting on very well at all anyway.
While Lizard is an Amazon exclusive, Electro is available at real stores. Target, mostly. Where they put it on the shelf for $39.99, which is why I've been continually passing on it - this isn't woth $40 + tax. And apparently a lot of people agree, because the price has been slowly coming back down to a reasonable range. You can now find it at online sources for under $30, which is much better. The toy's decent, and completes the movie lineup, but don't let yourself be suckered into overpaying just because of that.
-- 06/30/25
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