When it's not boring, it's mostly dreadful

Rating: 1/10 (5 August 2004)

This film wants to be a drama, a love story, sci-fi movie and action extravaganza all at the same time, and then just screws up everything.
The action scenes are not bad, but really not that different from the first movie.
As far as sci-fi goes, it's all fiction and no science. The whole idea of professor Octavius and his "great invention" is completely unconvincing and seem extremely far fetched, not unlike the plot twists. But then, it is a comic-book-movie.
But where this film really goes south is the drama/love story. It's an endless string of clichés, the characters are cardboard and the only thing truly dramatic is the quality of the dialog. Both the characters of Peter and of Mary Jane are so hopeless and indecisive that you end up hoping the bad guy kills them, just to get it over with. The pace is excruciatingly slow, so during the seemingly endless dialogs, ones eyelids tend to get very heavy.
Even the jokes in the movie don't work that well. It *tries* too hard to be funny, but it just isn't. The only exception is the scene in the elevator, that was hilarious.
If all of this isn't bad enough, the studios Morality Department also got hold of the script somewhere along the line. They injected a large dose of those wholesome "American Values", talking at lenght about American Heroes and rolemodels etc. Almost made me physically sick.
I still would have given it 3/10, but right now it's in the top 250. Even if you're not a harsh as I am about this film, then let's at least agree that in the history of cinema, surely we can find at least 250 films that are better than this one.