Spiderman II Will Beget III

Rating: Null/10 (4 July 2004)

Sequels of successful movies (by definition box office receipts determine which films might be candidates) may or may not be up to the quality of the original work. The same metric (ticket sales) determines, in the final analysis, whether subsequent releases might be in order. `Spiderman II' will certainly beget `III', but there are many of us that will not be in the theater the third time around.
In the newest release we find that Spiderman has put aside his crime fighting compulsion to pursue a normal existence. He has confronted real life and found his own progress  and he is a very young man, not an adult  unsatisfactory. That is, unsatisfactory when measured against personal achievement (school and girls, primarily) and to a lesser extent the expectations of others. Of course in true sub-adult behavior he has taken ownership of others problems as well, and unlike most of us is besieged by memories (his uncle, for example) of the sentimental persuasion.
But as always in the comic book kingdom there are forces at work beyond society's ability to deal with them. A physicist (Doctor Octavius, played compellingly by Alfred Molina) has gotten completely out of control, and he himself does not know (nor do we) where the power of forces he has harnessed might lead. It becomes necessary for our hero to come out of exile, as it were, and save The City (never been a superhero that saved an endangered species, parcel of BLM land or estuary).	It might be helpful for a viewer to be a real comic book fan to appreciate this newest release. The effects are, for all their hype, just okay. More specifically, Spidey's flights through The City are cartoonish looking; certain aspects of Doctor Octavius' appearance are very nice, though. But all in all comic book art is as real as that seen in the new CGI world.

What really enervates `Spiderman II', however, is the talking (mostly monologues) and extended action scenes. In order to show us this more sensitive superhero we must suffer an awful lot of nonessential plot points (consider his aunt and her issues) and Kirsten Dunst's (playing Mary Jane) parallel search for happiness. And by the way, the train sequence is WAY too long.
Tobey Maguire (Peter Parker) certainly is one of the best choices ever made for the regular guy component of the Superhero/mortal man formula. Thinking of The Hulk, Superman or Batman in film history we find there have been no more believable or likeable equivalents. But Peter's humanness is exploited to the extent that future visits to this mine might yield very little in the way of additional sensitivity nuggets.
Fans of a particular movie or movie genre are opinionated and, to their credit, informed, compelling us like them to find out for ourselves whether the sequel is equal or better. In this case we should consider that the novelty of `Spiderman' has worn off, and we find in viewing `Spiderman II' that if some editing (approximately 30 minutes) had been done, the film would be far more likable. And that Tobey Maguire is up to recreating his role in any number of sequels. But this one is not better than the original.
Rating: Three Stars.