Better than the first Spiderman, but still fairly unimpressive

Rating: 5/10 (23 February 2005)

Spiderman is back and he's kicking butt. Unfortunately, his alter-ego Peter Parker (Maguire) is having a hard time multi-tasking and everything in his life is suffering. He is failing in college, he can't hold down a job, his aunt is losing her house, and (seemingly most important to Peter) while he's Spiderman he can't romance Mary Jane Watson (Dunst). To make matters worse, Harry Osborn, (Franco) Parker's best friend, keeps harassing Peter to tell him where he can find Spiderman so he can avenge his father. When Parker's school career comes down to a paper that he is writing on Dr. Otto Octavius (Molina), Parker is delighted when Osborn offers to introduce the two, since his company is funding Octavius' research. The two strike up a repoire, but unfortunately, the next day an experiment in fusion goes horribly wrong and Octavius ends up with four metal limbs with minds of their own fused to his spine. Because he has lost everything, (including his mind) Octavius (now known as Doc Ock) goes on a mission to redo the experiment, wreaking havoc on the city along the way. Meanwhile, Parker has decided to give up his double life so that he can concentrate on his life, so he has to make some tough decisions about his future, and the future of Spiderman.
When I saw the first "Spiderman", I was entertained but I wasn't amazed. I found the effects to be too cartoonish, and the story to be pretty lacking. In the case of "Spiderman 2" I found the story to be better and more compelling (the amount of conflict that arose was decent) and the special effects were definitely better, but again, I was less than amazed. I certainly didn't see the need for it to be on the IMDb Top 250 list, and it doesn't surprise me that it has fallen off, but from the reviews (both professional and from friends) I read and heard I expected a lot more. The acting was about on par with most action films; meaning it was okay but not great. (Although I still can't stand Kirsten Dunst.) Unfortunately, the best actor in the film was woefully underused, which was a disappointment mainly because he was the villain. Alfred Molina is a fantastic character actor and I think that he could have really made the role of Doc Ock great if he had only been given a sufficient amount of screen time. He didn't get to chew the scenery as much as Dafoe did in the first "Spiderman" film, and I think the movie suffered for it.
While the story was better this time around, and the special effects didn't make me cringe at times, I'm still unimpressed by this franchise. Considering I'm a fan of Raimi's other work, and I used to read Spiderman in comic form I think I should be a little more excited with the film than I am. It gets a 5/10 from me.
--Shelly