Reviewed: Spider-Man 2 (2004)

Written by Michael Chabon, Alfred Gough, Miles Millar, and Alvin Sargent; directed by Sam Raimi. With Kirsten Dunst, Tobey Maguire, and Alfred Molina.

Reviewed by DTL
Posted July 7, 2004

The new movie Spider-Man 2 has set box-office records since it opened a week ago. In simpler, more innocent times we knew enough not to care about things like that, but today they apparently aid our appreciation. How can we know if a movie is any good unless we know its opening-weekend gross?

Well, you can listen to me. I recommend you see Spider-Man 2. It’s not a good movie, but it is a fun movie. It’s an entertaining ride. It’s the comic book brought to life.

The first half-hour of the movie piles the troubles on poor Peter Parker. His activities as Spider-Man interfere with every other part of his life: He loses his job delivering pizzas. He can’t break out of the Spidey-ghetto in his professional life. He’s drowning financially. He’s in danger of flunking out of university. He doesn’t even have time for his friends Harry and Mary Jane.

Even when he does his laundry, his Spidey costume runs and stains his other clothes. That’s a cute piece of symbolism — Spider-Man bleeding into every area of his life.

Things get so bad that Peter eventually quits being Spidey altogether. He’s tried this a few times in the comics, but it never sticks; being Spidey is part of who he is, and he always goes back to it. And of course he does here as well, defeating the villain and even winning the girl by the time the movie is over.

Things I liked

I’d like to single out a few things I liked:

• The characters are intelligent. Peter and Dr. Octavius bond over their shared love of science, and Octavius’s speech about how “intelligence is a gift to be used in the service of mankind”, while corny, was still affecting.

  I’m a sucker for this, because most movies and TV shows seem to exalt in how dumb their characters are, apparently equating stupidity with a kind of down-home authenticity and goodness. Smart characters are inevitably snobby, duplicitous, hypocritical, and British; either that, or they’re outright nerds whose job it is to be beaten and scorned, and even they understand this.

  I find that depressing. I like it when characters are smart, and succeed because of their intelligence.

• The CGI is a lot better this time than in the last movie. It’s like the difference between Superman and Superman II, respectively. (Seriously, why does the second Superman movie look worse than the first?) And the filmmakers seem to have taken into account the actual (albeit comic-book) physics of the situations.

  • Spidey looks a lot less rubbery this time; he has a skeleton, he has mass. The web-swinging scenes through the thirty-story canyons of New York skyscrapers are positively vertiginous.

  • When Doc Ock lifts a car or other huge object, at least one and usually two of his tentacles brace on the ground. Ock’s own skeleton could not, of course, bear the weight of a car.

  • The hand-to-hand (-to-hand-to-hand . . . ) combat between Spidey and Doc Ock atop an elevated train is really good. They fight on top of the speeding train, down the side, inside — it’s thrilling.

• Peter makes some intelligent decisions. For example, when the eyes of his mask get scorched, he whips his mask off. Preserving his secret identity is obviously a distant second to preserving his ability to see in a fight.

• Peter has a piece of cake and a glass of milk with Ursula, his landlord’s daughter. It’s just a sweet scene. Tobey Maguire plays the scene with recognition that not only would he enjoy some cake, but it would be cruel to turn down this plain-but-pretty girl who obviously has a crush on him and wants to do something nice for him.

• Count me among those critics who are pleased to see more of J. Jonah Jameson. J.K. Simmons is perfect; he looks, sounds, and acts just as I always knew Jolly Jonah would. The filmmakers give him more screen time than in the first movie, but wisely restrain themselves to sprinkling him here and there like a rare seasoning. He’s only a one-note character, and he’s so delightful I don’t want to get bored of him.

• Spidey’s super-powers having failed, he has to take the elevator down from the roof like a normal person. A guy joins him on the elevator, and praises his "cool-looking Spidey costume". Spidey admits that it itches, and rides up in the crotch. The scene lasts a long time, the humour coming from the excrutiating pseudo-intimacy of two people in an elevator, amplified by the fact that one of them wears a ridiculous costume.

  There’s also an inside joke here. Hal Sparks plays the elevator guy. On Queer as Folk, Mr. Sparks plays Michael Novotny, a comic book writer whose character is optioned for a Hollywood movie.

Things that irked me

There were, of course, some things about the movie that I did not like. These include:

• Too many echoes of the first movie:

  • Doc Ock becomes a villain through an accident during an experiment. That’s the same method that gave us the Green Goblin in the first movie. Sure, Otto Octavius is more of a good guy than Norman Osborn was, but it’s still too close.

  • Peter rescues a kid trapped in a burning building. Sure, I get the point: Peter’s a hero because of who he is, not because of his Spidey-powers. But he did the same thing in the first movie; couldn’t the filmmakers have found some other way to dramatize the situation?

  • Stan Lee’s obligatory cameo consists of him pulling an innocent bystander out of the way of falling rubble — exactly as in the first movie.

• Peter dreams a conversation with Uncle Ben in an ethereal Oldsmobile. By this time, we’ve got the point, or we should have, that Peter’s having an existential crisis. Do we really need to have it laid out so baldly? And we get to hear Uncle Ben say, “With great power comes great responsibility,” — again. The whole scene just seems unnecessary.

• Too many scenes don’t have consequences:

  • Doc Ock attacks the bank where Peter and Aunt May are applying for a loan. Peter rushes off to change into Spider-Man. Aunt May watches him run away and cries, “Peter! Don’t leave me!” Shouldn’t she at least be mad at him later?

  • Peter confesses to Aunt May that he could have stopped the robber who later killed Uncle Ben. Aunt May is so upset by this revelation that she flees upstairs without a word.

    He may feel responsible, but it wasn’t Peter’s fault; he couldn’t have known that the robber would kill anyone, and he couldn’t have known that Uncle Ben would be conveniently returning just at that moment. Nevertheless, if he had stopped the robber, Uncle Ben would still be alive.

    Yet when next they meet, she says that they don’t need to talk about this again, and that she loves Peter. Nothing is made of the previous dramatic moment.

    Fine — she’s a very forgiving woman, and she knows that Peter isn’t directly reponsible for her husband’s death. But shouldn’t she say something to that effect? Or maybe, as a parent would, try to absolve him of guilt? “It wasn’t your fault, Peter. You couldn’t have known.” Peter could reply, “I shouldn’t have stood aside when I could have done something,” and we see his sense of responsibility that is the key to the Spider-Man character.

  • Twice, Spidey’s super-powers fail him and he falls from a great height. The second time he limps away, moaning, “Oh, my back!” — an inside joke referring to the well-documented back injury that almost kept Mr. Maguire from reprising his role.

    But the first time, he falls from a hell of a height — tens of stories, it looks like. Sure, the ductwork he lands on probably cushions the impact somewhat. Sure, he probably still has some residual super-powers that protect him from injury. But it temporarily broke my willing suspension of disbelief.

• Mary Jane leaves her fiancé John Jameson at the altar. Wouldn’t a sensitive person have broken it off before then? It makes her seem more callow and heartless than I think the filmmakers intend.

The movie gives us three villains to choose from for future movies.

Harry Osborn is obviously set up as the second Green Goblin. Let’s hope he leaves off the silly Power Rangers mask.

All Spidey fans know that Dr. Curt Connors is also The Lizard. (If I recall correctly, his name in the comic was (at least sometimes) Connor — no “s”. But that doesn’t matter — except to show how geeky I am.)

And J. Jonah Jameson’s son, John, came under the power of an otherworldly gem he found on one of his moon missions and became Man-Wolf. Look again at that leap he makes from the pier to Mary Jane at the end of the movie. That’s quite a distance, and he covers it very gracefully and seemingly without effort. Is he, unknown even to himself, already manifesting his Man-Wolf abilities?

I’ve heard lots of fans say they want to see Venom as the villain in one of the movies. Frankly, I always thought Venom was pretty lame and kind of ridiculous. I suspect that those fans who love him became Spider-fans during that awful period when the “artists” who would soon form Image Comics were drawing books of pinups instead of comics stories, and really liked his tongue.

I understand Director Sam Raimi and stars Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst will return for Spider-Man 3. I have enjoyed the first two movies enough that I look forward to the third.