Within the first half hour or so of this movie, we could see our hero: Get yelled at by his boss, get stiffed on a bill delivering pizzas by a snotty receptionist, lose his job, get yelled at by his other boss, find he owes money to co-workers, failing his college classes, have his aunt throw him a birthday party when shes having trouble paying bills, see his best friend obsessed with killing our protagonists alter ego, hear his cute girlfriend may be leaving him, find he owes back money to his LANDLORD and the birthday money is needed to appease him-and his apartment is a dump. DAMN!!! Can I send Peter Parker a few dollars to some charity he's attached to?! A little of this goes a long way, and thats a LOT to swallow in the first act.
That could in fact be the point of Spiderman 2, called the greatest comic book movie made, a title that lasted till Batman Begins showed up the following year which was free of super melodrama and had more super hero. There are scenes where Spiderman is flying around town and you can almost hear the speech bubbles above his head talk of how is he doing the right thing? What is more important, furthering the professional school life that makes him happy? Or being the superhero and using his great power for great responsibility to stop the crime that the New York city cops can't cope with? Sometimes his powers fail him and he needs his glasses, other times his radioactive spider powers work just fine. Is his own body trying to tell him something? It's a good thing his powers are working most of time cause a scientist that Peter admires has gone insane after an accident and tries his experiments again which could endanger all of New York. In between this, Peter makes his decisions as to how to live his life.
Notice how I only mentioned a little bit of the villain in that sentance? Yeah this movie could almost serve as a deconstruction of super heroes instead of the big summer action movie that your expecting, with it's talk of what am I doing and is this right. Spiderman meets NiteOwl and Silk Spectre if thats the case, I'll re-read Watchmen if I want the same effect.
All the casting is as good as it was before in the first Spiderman movie, especially JK Simmons who plays J Jonah Jameson to a blustering tee as before. Alfred Molina takes the place as the villian as Otto Octavious who becomes the obsessed Doctor Octopus who despite his flab has some wicked metal tentacles to smash Spiderman with. The two only get a couple of action scenes together but when they fight, it's phenomenal. This movie really could have benefitted from more of these scenes and less of Peter suffering and padding out the drama that spell out to us whats going on when we already know. Damn spoonfeeding the audience sometimes.
The bottom line here is that this movie bathes in the melodrama that I was so happy the Iron Man movies avoided. I saw this twice in the theatres and the wangst was bad enough to make another Star Wars prequel. I did sympathize with the characters, even the villian and the acting wasn't bad but why should a fun action movie be so full of baggage that makes the movie feel heavy and heady? I guess the flipside to that is if it was so full of nonsense Michael Bay would have directed it so maybe the baggage is good, just not a steamer trunk, maybe a duffel bag. The positives do outweight the heady negatives and once done, you have a nice action movie but the Spider sense is still tingling feeling that something more upbeat could have been made. He's a friendly neighborhood Spiderman who has radioactivity in his blood, not prozac.
