Spider-Man 2

2004

As I said in my previous post, Spider-Man was a decent, albeit flawed, film. It showed the underdog rising up and becoming the city's savior. Simple, but good story filled with some great and some poor acting. The big problem comes with Spider-Man 2, which when you really do look at it, is the EXACT same film as the first film, with a lot of topical changes and a few minor plotting changes. This is the single reason why I did not like this film. You don’t spend 2 years in between films to just come out with the same exact thing, at least not if you want to be taken seriously.

What’s worse is you don’t come out with a direct sequel that completely undercuts the first film. You can watch the second film as if it was the first of the series and you’ll only miss a few character moments – of which mostly deal only with Harry. Harry continuously complains about how Spider-Man killed his father, Peter loves MJ, but can't have her (again and again), and when he's trying to get back his powers there are just too many "I'm almost Spider-Man but I lose my ‘focus’ too often" scenes.

The first film was two hours long, which included a lot of time establishing the characters and basic plot. As I mentioned earlier, the second film did the exact same thing, so the film was about 2 hours long which included about an hour even before Spider-Man gets any sort of motivation to do anything.

The middle of the film was dull and repetitive. The audience understood that he was down on his luck and nothing was going his way that looked the least bit promising. He had a crappy life as Spider-Man. Just about the only thing that Raimi could have done to make that more obvious is if he came to the theaters and beat us with a baseball bat over our heads yelling "his life sucks". Over an hour of "down on his luck Peter-as-Spider-Man" and "look how much my is better now that I'm not Spider-Man-Peter" got so dreadfully boring that if I even owned the film I'd end up *gasp* hitting the skip button on the DVD player.

The film is filled with the same flaws as the first film, from corny acting, poor syndicated-television show style edits, and choppy plot. I hope if the third film is the same exact plot people will be smart enough to realize they are watching the same thing for a third time. We already know that the whole “Harry hates Spider-Man/Peter” plot will be back, and hopefully will be resolved quickly. Maybe there will be another burning building! That’ll be original. At least Sandman and Venom aren’t scientists who let their inventions eventually dominate them. I guess I’ll find out soon enough.

Verdict: ** ½ /*****