Movie Review:

Spider-Man 2

    With the rare exception of those that are only created to continue or finish a story, sequels are generally expected to up the ante from the film they succeed.  Sequels to action films tend to have this expectation be even greater.  And when the film in question is both an action/superhero film and one that is attempting to draw out a story arc across several films, a lot is going to be expected.

    As such, people were expecting a lot out of Spider-Man 2.  The original smashed box office records - but it was, after all, not much more than an origin story.  Those can certainly be fun, and Spider-Man was, but they almost exist mostly to make sequels possible.  This summer saw the release of that inevitable sequel, and the trailers were making it look pretty good.

    Then something strange happened: Sam Raimi decided to make the same movie.

    Yeah, it's not the same movie.  But apart from the magnitude of the plot points, the ante isn't really being upped because it simply isn't being changed.  Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) has some issues.  Then a villain - whose alter-ego, for some reason, is apparently required to know Peter personally - shows up.  They fight.  Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) gets threatened, Harry (James Franco) gets sulky, Aunt May (Rosemary Harris) gives Peter a pep talk, and eventually Peter wins.  Formula.

    Not everything is completely the same, of course.  The "Spider-Man No More" storyline isn't a bad one, though it doesn't seem to last very long.  Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina) is a more interesting villain than Green Goblin and a better-rendered one as well - sadly, he's tragically underused.  The film focuses probably more on Peter Parker than it does on Spider-Man - which is not intrinsically a bad thing, and probably saves the film from falling into the pit of action sequels that try only to up the special effects, but it's interesting to note.

    The other major change falls under the heading of problematic.  I'm all for directors having their own styles, but someone should have stepped up and told Sam Raimi that the Evil Dead operating room scene was incredibly unnecessary.  Spider-Man isn't horror, and though it's nice that Raimi wants to acknowledge his roots, this wasn't the place to do it: it's a jarring, overlong scene that simply needed to be cut.  (It's at least two minutes longer than it needs to be to get its point across.)  Ditto for the "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" montage, which is much less egregious but still feels tremendously out of place.

    Spider-Man 2 is probably a bit better than Spider-Man overall, for a few main reasons: its villain is better, its conflicts are marginally more interesting, its effects are more fluid, and it doesn't have to worry about being an origin story, getting to deal with the meatier parts of the story arc.  Despite having what would seem to be several legs up, though, it's really only slightly more enjoyable overall.  I can't really figure out why this is, but it's the way I came out feeling.  Thus, your opinion of this film will depend on your opinion of the first, which I rate these days as "not bad, but nothing amazing."

    The really disappointing thing about that is that the end of Spider-Man 2 gives up what was, until that point, basically the driving factor of the conflict between Peter and Harry and between Peter and Mary Jane.  With that out of the way, it's hard to imagine what the inevitable third movie could introduce for conflict that could make things any tenser than they were.

    Thus, Spider-Man 2 is an even greater letdown when we consider it's probably the best Spider-Man film we're ever going to get.  B

Spider-Man 2 is a Columbia Pictures release.  Rated for stylized action violence.