Spider-Man 2
( PG-13 )
Web-master: Unassuming superhero gives `Spider-Man 2' its appeal
Review by James Verniere
Tuesday, June 29, 2004
We're supposed to be excited about the Spider-Man-Doc Ock matchup in ``Spider-Man 2,'' but the real summer-movie smackdown is between Spider-Man and that jolly green giant of an ogre named Shrek, not to mention that ogre of political satire Michael Moore.
An aura of tragic-romantic pop seriousness pervades Sam Raimi's follow-up to his 2002 original. This is not a fatal flaw, as it was in Ang Lee's ``The Hulk.'' But even as a child, I believed the Marvel comics focused too much on how much a loser Peter Parker is and not how much fun it would be to be Spider-Man.
Spider-Man is every dork's favorite superhero. He wears glasses, dresses like a schlub, studies hard (now there's a unique twist), is chronically short of money, hopelessly in love with the literal girl-next-door and constantly worried about his frail Aunt May.
In ``Spider-Man 2,'' the role is again played by the talented Tobey Maguire, after he initially balked. Maguire's Peter Parker is failing to balance his duties as superheroic protector of the common folk and his roles as New York City University student, friend and wage-earner.
Dressed dorkily as usual, Peter, a freelance photographer for the Daily Bugle, is delivering pizzas for an angry boss of Middle Eastern descent (Aasif Mandvi) on a beat-up moped and looping in and out of choked Manhattan traffic like a whirligig.
Sick of being mired in the noise and fumes, Peter suddenly changes costume in the blink of an eye and soon swings in huge parabolic curves through Manhattan's lofty canyons, pizzas in hand. These scenes distill the essence of a comic book's appeal without a cheap plug for Domino's or any other pizza chain.
Peter's ``best friend'' Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst) is now a model and stage actress appearing on both billboards and off-Broadway in Oscar Wilde's comedy about flip-flopping identities, ``The Importance of Being Earnest.'' Peter's other friend Harry Osborn (again, the overheated James Franco) still holds Peter's ``buddy'' Spider-Man responsible for the death of his father Norman (Willem Dafoe), also known as the Green Goblin.
Among the most memorable characters in part 2 are the dignified, grandmotherly Aunt May (the great Rosemary Harris) and blustery blowhard newspaper publisher J. Jonah Jameson (scene-stealing J.K. Simmons), who can't wait to plaster the headline ``Masked Menace Terrorizes City'' across the front page of the Daily Bugle. Another standout is Alfred Molina's Dr. Otto Octavius, a genius who dotes on his wife (Donna Murphy) when he isn't perfecting his fusion machine.
During a demonstration, Octavius uses four snakelike metal tentacles attached to his spine to manipulate the machinery. When an ``inhibitor chip'' is destroyed, the reptilian tentacles turn him into the half-man, half-``Alien''-like mechanical monster Doctor Octopus.
Suspended from these powerful, whiplike metal limbs, each of which has a snapping, deadly looking flowerlike ``mouth'' at its end, Doc Ock trudges heavily up and down the streets and up and over skyscrapers like another kind of spider. In one allusive scene, Doc Ock lifts Mary Jane up and carries her to a rootop a la King Kong and the immortal Fay Wray.
Raimi and screenwriters Alvin Sargent (``Unfaithful''), Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (``Lethal Weapon 4'') and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon pump plenty of youthful angst and frustrated romance onto the screen. Both Doc Ock and Spidey have lost the women they love. Rebuffed by Peter, Mary Jane announces she's getting married to an astronaut. The ghostlike memory of Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson) appears briefly to remind Peter of his responsibility. Harry, too, has conversations with his dead father. Most of this, however, seems prefabricated and not very interesting.
Raimi's strengths are his keen visual imagination and his flair for slapstick comedy. Peter, we learn, has a missing comic book collection. Spider-Man's costume turns out to be wash-and-wear, although it runs and rides up in the crotch. A ``lonely web-slinger'' montage plays goofily to the tune of the Burt Bacharach standard ``Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head.''
A scene in which a car sails slowly through the air at a huge plate glass window behind which Peter and Mary Jane are about to kiss perfectly mimics the captured kineticism of comic-book panel art. (Too bad it's in all the trailers.) Like ``Spider-Man's'' finest comic-book artists, Raimi somehow both freezes action and depicts it in all its explosive energy.
Similarly memorable is an exciting, beautifully edited and choreographed fight between Doc Ock and Spidey aboard an elevated train. Occasionally, Doc Ock's tentacles suggest serpentine puppets with their own will and intelligence.
I could have done without the psychosomatic-loss-of-Spidey-powers subplot, which makes no sense, and if Spider-Man gets unmasked any more, he's going to have to get an 800 number.
While I can't guarantee he'll outdo ``Shrek 2'' at the box office, I'm sure this web-slinger is going to spin rings around the bogeyman behind ``Fahrenheit 9/11.''
Raindrops..in Spider Man 2
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