"Spider-Man 2"

Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst are back, but this sorta square Spidey movie doesn't swing.

By Charles Taylor

Jun 30, 2004 | If you're going to make adolescent self-pity the heart of a movie -- and you're not going to parody it -- then it should be so masochistically self-involved that it becomes a rapturous wallow. (That's the brand of hysteria Elia Kazan whipped up in his roaring-hormones classics "East of Eden" and "Splendor in the Grass.")

"Spider-Man 2" is too square to take that approach, and not imaginative enough to take any other. For a big-budget action movie "Spider-Man 2" is modest and not assaultive -- it has a boring decency. The pokiness of the first "Spider-Man" was forgivable because the picture had a sweet spirit and because it was unusual to see an action blockbuster that wasn't out to bonk you over the head every few minutes. It was also almost immediately forgettable. (About all I retain from it is Kirsten Dunst mugging as she poses for Tobey Maguire in the first scene, and their later kiss in a rain-drenched alley as he, in Spidey drag, hangs upside down.)

Like its predecessor, "Spider-Man 2" was directed by Sam Raimi. For a filmmaker who has spent much of his career dealing in the fantastic, Raimi is awfully prosaic. His best movie remains the overlooked heartland noir "A Simple Plan," which showed what Hollywood used to call an "invisible" command of craft and narrative; the movie also felt as though it had been made for adults. Those same qualities were present in Raimi's paranormal thriller "The Gift." The plot was Southern-gothic trash, but the details and sense of place felt authentic and, as in "A Simple Plan," Raimi took real care with the performances.

But in his outright genre movies, like the western pastiche "The Quick and the Dead" and the comic-book adventure "Darkman," Raimi has never escaped a B-movie flatness. That quality worked to the advantage of the best of them, the giddy horror slapstick "Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn." The B-movie cruddiness gave the racing camera and the stop-motion dancing corpses something to bounce off.

The "Spider-Man" movies are genre pictures writ large (or at least expensive). Raimi is a capable director who I don't think has ever demonstrated a crass impulse, but he just doesn't have the excess of spirit, sense of grandeur, and flights of poetic imagination that a comic-book extravaganza needs.

In "Spider-Man 2" he shows flashes of a nasty, wild streak. One character exits the movie in a hail of flying, jagged glass. We see her screaming face reflected in the approaching shards. It's a terrific image, obviously an homage to Carrie Snodgress' death in "The Fury." But that flying glass needs to cut the movie's flesh (and ours) as well as the character's, and the death is too easily forgotten. Like all the best effects in the movie, it's muffled.

There's a promising villain this time out. Dr. Otto Octavius, aka Doc Ock and played by Alfred Molina, is the proverbial good scientist turned evil -- in this case when experiments to develop an alternative energy source leave him with four mechanical tentacles embedded in his spine, each doing his telepathic bidding. They're quite a sight, with their snapping jaws open like a rattler ready to strike, and there's a purring menace in the way they coil around Molina like familiars. Doc Ock can use those metallic arms to crawl up buildings or to hoist himself into the air, and I wanted to see those crazy arms do more inventively meaner things -- as well as to see Molina get a few arias to sing the mournfulness driving Doc Ock's rage.

Next Page: An adventure without cunning or bloodlust

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