Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2: Closer to Doing Whatever a Spider Can
Written: Jul 03 '04
Product Rating:
Pros: More assured effects and direction and performances... Nice moments of humor...
Cons: Redundant theme and they still haven't figured out how to work the bad guys in...
The Bottom Line: A 3.5 star recommendation for a blockbuster that delivers the summer fun. Don't be fooled, though, by gushing reviews calling it an unqualified success.
Was it Aesop who once taught us that with great power comes great responsibility? Nah. Perhaps it was a green muppet down in Dagobah. That sounds like something Yoda might say. I guess not. Was it my fortune cookie at Lucky Panda last week? Seems plausible as well. But no. Alas, that silly cliche, which I now like to repeat at entirely inappropriate situations (like whenever the lights go out or whenever I pay my electricity bills) comes from the original Spider-Man movie, where it was more than just a mere theme. It was an oppressive mantra.
Given the two years since the initial release of Spider-Man and the entirely new cast of scribes (including Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Michael Chabon), you'd think that somebody would have uncorked a different message for the second film and yet there you are. After nearly two hours of Spider-Man 2, I was learning, once again, that with great power came great responsibility. Not only was Uncle Ben right, he was really really really right. Given three more years before the next inevitable sequel and they're still probably going to be trying to reinforce that with great power, great responsibility also comes (I think *that* was what Yoda actually said).
Please put me in the column of people who get it already.
More practically, I suppose, Spider Man 2 is about the idea of free will and rediscovering your inner superhero, but in reality the message of self actualization really only applies to people who have been bitten by radioactive spiders and can ejaculate sticky white webs from their hands. There's little indication in movie that if I, for example, wanted to unleash my inner superhero, I could. Auntie Mae may say that there's a hero in all of us, but really there's only a hero in Peter Parker and he's gotta come to the realization that with great power comes great responsibility.
Redundant thematics aside, Spider-Man 2 is a summer hoot. While hardly the unmitigated classics that some overzealous critics might have you believe (be patient with us... we've already had a horrible summer), the movie is successful warm weather candyfloss. Crippled somewhat by the same problems that left the first movie merely a slight pleasure, Spider-Man 2 is a return to form for director Sam Raimi. For the first time in several years, Raimi seems to be having as much fun as he used to have back on films like Evil Dead and, particularly, the superhero semi-classic Darkman.Spider-Man 2 is both funnier and scarier than its predecessor.
The script for Spider-Man 2 is a peculiar concoction that leaves folks like me searching for authorial intent. The Smallville duo of Miles Millar and Alfred Gough wrote one draft and Chabon wrote another and yet that trio only gets a "screen story" credit, while the screenplay is credited solely to Alvin Sargent, an Oscar winner for Julia and Ordinary People back in the day. Who contributed all of the internal emotions? Who provided the myriad sight gags? Who added the various in-jokes? Honestly, it'd be impossible to know.
We begin a while after the end of the first movie (two years after the death of Cliff Robertson's Uncle Ben, but I'm not sure how long after the death of the Green Goblin) and our characters have had some ups and downs. Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst) has gone from waitress to a respected actress. She's also become a perfume model, which means that her image is all over Metropolis, constantly mocking Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) who spends so much time saving the city that he's falling apart. Peter can barely hold down his pizza delivery job (the source of the film's fantastic opening scene, which suggests that perhaps the next Spider-Man villain could be The Noid), much less have time for his classes at a university that looks a lot like Columbia or his friends. Thus, Peter isn't paying much attention to the fact that best bud Harry Osbourn (James Franco) has become an absolute whack-job, obsessing over his conviction that Spider-Man murdered his father.
Despite clearly being deranged, Harry's doing OK as the moneyman for the company his father founded. Os Corp is currently funding the research of Dr. Otto Octavius (Alfred Molina), who is doing something with cold fusion. Cold Fusion, as film fans know, is something that writers resort to as a plot device when they can't think of another darned thing to write about. It's like they know that when viewers hear the words "cold fusion" they just tune out until something blows up again. Well, Octavius takes a liking to Peter (whose professor described him as "brilliant but lazy"), so Peter's on hand when the scientist unveils his, um, plan to create cold fusion. When your depiction of cold fusion is even sillier than how the fantasy was handled in The Saint or that awful movie with Keanu Reeves, you know you've done something right. Octavius is using a funny spinning mineral and, most importantly, giant mechanical arms that he welds onto his back. They respond to his thoughts, but only because of a little plastic inhibitor chip at the top of his spin. Then again, if a famed scientist things that fusing massive metal arms to his spine isn't a bad idea, why should I? Well, things go wrong. No, really? The plastic chip is shattered and Octavius becomes more machine than man. While some evil machines want to take over the universe, though, this one has a very specific and nefarious goal: He wants to complete the doctor's experiments in cold fusion. Huh? As you may have guessed, even after critics and viewers derided the Green Goblin has an uninspired villain in the first film, no effort was put into better integrating Doc Ock this time around.
The arrival of a new supervillain, albeit one bent only on scientific exploration, couldn't come at a worse time for Metropolis, because Peter Parker is having some problems with his secret identity. It's bad enough that being Spider-Man is preventing him from seeing Mary Jane in an Off Broadway production of The Importance of Being Ernest, but he's begun to have performance anxiety. Suddenly he's unable to shoot his web load like he used to, which causes problems if you're trying to swing from building to building. Suddenly, the young man is failing as both Peter Parker and as Spider-Man. Fearing that he's lost all control, Parker shelves his alter ego and decides that the city can fend for itself, thank-you-very-much.
This all reinforces a lesson that some of us learned from the greatest comic book movie of all-time, Richard Lester's Superman 2: At the end of the day, superheroes are always willing to give up everything to be with a pretty gal, but the next morning, they are inevitably wracked with guilt. Love, you see, is always a one-night stand when you're a superhero, because saving lives is your only permanent mistress. This is what Peter Parker must discover. With great power, he comes to realize, comes great responsibility.
With the first Spider-Man movie, Raimi and writer David Koepp did such a superior job of developing the hero's origin story that many viewers have forgiven the fact that the second half of the movie doesn't have any kind of narrative drive at all. I have vivid memories of much of the film's first hour, but the only thing I remember from the second hour is Kirsten Dunst standing in the cold rain (and even that may actually come earlier in the movie). The Green Goblin, a potentially interesting adversary, never really came together as a character, at least not in costume. Willem Dafoe did fine work conveying the character's internal struggle, but the character was reduced to a tangential obstacle rather than the compelling contrast to our hero that, say, The Joker provided in Tim Burton's first Batman outing.
Things aren't much better for Molina's Doc Ock. It's one thing for a villain to want to take over the world, but Doc Ock's only real crime is that his desire for cold fusion outweighs his sense of the experiment's risks. The only contrast with Spider-Man is the goofy notion that Peter Parker is so engulfed in his secret identity that he can't even get his homework done, while all that Doc Ock wants to do is complete what is basically his own homework. Doc Ock isn't exactly evil so much as he's willing to do evil things to create cold fusion. Again, I'll leave it for you, faithful reader, to determine if that's as comical as it seems to me.
The only advantage that Molina's Doc Ock has over Dafoe's Green Goblin is that he isn't stuck in a green fright mask for the entire movie. That lets Molina revel in his character's callous disregard for life and property with a twinkle in his eye that Dafoe didn't get to do. Thanks to nifty sound effects accompanying Doc Ock's every move, the character makes a larger impact than the Green Goblin ever couple. He's more fundamentally impressive. That doesn't mean, though, that he's any better integrated into the film. There are plenty of good Spider-Man foils and for the third movie, the writers really should concentrate on giving the webslinger a worthy foe.
Molina's also a capable enough actor to sell some of the summer's worst dialogue. As bad as his explanation of cold fusion sounds, his advice to Peter about wooing women with poetry is even worse and it doesn't have any real payoff in the script except for the jokey scene of Peter reading "Hiawatha" at a Laundromat.
The reason why the second movie holds together better narratively is that Peter Parker's personal journey is much more intelligently rendered this time around. While Doc Ock is an external distraction, Parker's problems are all internal. He's still incapacitated by his love for Mary Jane and he's got a healthy measure of guilt for both the death of his uncle and the death of his best friend's father. Granted that he's capable of doing whatever a spider can, but it's the basic human stuff that's complicated. He thinks he just wants to have a girlfriend, study his physics and earn some extra coin at odd jobs, the fates demand more of him. This kind of crippling insecurity plays right into Maguire's greatest strengths as an actor and confirm the wisdom of casting the formerly indie actor in this part in the first place. While many actors might be more physically confident, Maguire wallows in Parker's misery and sells the intimate dimensions of the story. He's also got that look of clumsy bemusement down pat for the comic scenes.
The other actors also have more to do this time around. For a blockbuster summer movie, it's amazing how frequently the actors are on the verge of tears. I suspect it was Sargent who determined that there was no reason why Spider-Man 2 couldn't get in touch with its inner Chekhov.
Earlier I mention that Molina has the script's worst dialogue, but that's not really true. Franco does, because his character is prone to wild moodswings, alternating between money hungry playboy and self-pitying simp without any kind of transition. Franco, though, is a solid enough actor that I managed not to hate the character and, like Maguire, his he's not afraid to just break down. All signs point to him having an even larger role in the third movie, which should be fine.
Dunst, who brought nice levity to the first movie as a bubbly and appealing MJ, mostly mopes here. She's really just a mannequin, letting the costumer put her in all variety of fetching outfits. Fans of female objectification at the movies need not worry. Before Spider-Man 2 reaches its conclusion, Dunst finds herself chained to a wall in a soaking wet dress that clings to her like geeks clinging to screen captures of her first movie nipplage. You can't always get what you want, but if you wait long enough, you get what you need.
The supporting cast is led by J.K. Simmons' fantastic scenery munching turn as newspaper editor Jonah Jameson. Given enough screen time in future movies, Simmons' Jameson could emerge as one of cinema's great scene stealing parts, a welcome mix of comic relief and intensity with every appearance. The scene where he begrudgingly admits his admiration for Spider-Man and then returns to his virulent hatred his a real winner.
In bit parts, TV fans can catch appearances by Daniel Dae Kim (Angel), Marc John Jeffries (The Tracey Morgan Show), Bonnie Sommerville (The O.C.) and Vanessa Ferlito (24). Stan Lee has a blink-and-miss-him cameo and Bruce Campbell makes an obligatory and satisfying appearance as a by-the-books theatre usher. Also keep an eye out for appearances by two cast members from the first movie.
While Raimi looked to be having a good time in the first movie, he's embracing the comic book camp much more successfully here. From the forced perspective of the comic panel framing, to occasional editing tricks, he seems to know that after providing the studio with massive box office the first time around, he can get away with anything. The movie's best scene, for my money, is Doc Ock's rebirth in a sinister hospital operating room. The sequence is shockingly funny and it would be surprisingly gory except that you don't see anything. Everything is delivered in silhouettes and sharp cuts. Several other scenes also speak to a director who's just looking to have fun.
The movie's sense of humor is sharp, which is important given the main character's emotional tumult. Raimi and the writers have a great time delving into the minutiae of being a superhero, particularly such mundane issues as costume maintenance and what happens if you're stuck with a costume that just doesn't fit right. Raimi also seems ready to let the actors ham up the problematic dialogue, making it into a trait of the genre, rather than a liability. It's telling that in a $180 million action movie, the scene I most enjoyed featured Spider-Man and comic Hal Sparks riding an elevator together. I could have watched five or ten more minutes of that.
Bill Pope provides the comic book palette of the cinematography and does a nice job advancing the series' look from the solid work by Don Burgess in the first movie. Danny Elfman turns in yet another of his cookie-cutter superhero scores. He's reliable, but I'd love to hear what different composers would do if they got the gigs that keep going to Elfman and Hans Zimmer.
Here's how I want to qualify the advanced special effects in Spider-Man 2: I never entirely bought that I was looking at a real man in a real suit using his superpowers to swing around a city. I did, however, feel much more convinced that I was watching Spider-Man scooting around the city. Does that make sense? The effects still don't make things look real, but they make things fit into the hyper-real comic book universe of the movie. The film's effects centerpiece, a showdown between Doc Ock and Spider-Man on a moving train, was totally satisfying and looked as real as one could hope for at this point.
Spider-Man 2 has at least three or four conclusions which are satisfying to various degrees. The resolution to the Doc Ock/Spider-Man showdown is neither logical, satisfying nor exciting, confirming just how irrelevant the character was to the movie as a whole. However, the resolution to arcs involving Mary Jane and Harry are much more interesting, particularly looking forward to future movies.
Since unmitigated trash like Van Helsing and Troy have made it clear how difficult it is to do summer action right, it's important to give respect to Spider-Man 2. It shows a franchise evolving slowly, but still trying to work out some storytelling kinks. I'm fine with a 3.5 star out of 5 recommendation.
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