As entertaining as a movie can be

Rating: 10/10 (30 June 2004)

"Spider-Man 2" is filled with clichés, melodrama, and comic-book excess--all of which add up to a glorious, but gloriously human, spectacle and the most fun I have had watching a film in recent memory.
I went to a midnight showing with a packed audience, most of whom were probably fans of Spider-man, both the first film and the comic-book character. I suspected this when cheering applause broke out at the cameo of Stan Lee, one of the co-creators of the original "Spider-man" character.
Not everyone, however, was a fan. The person seated at my left was an older gentleman who was obviously not there for the movie but to escort his young, female companion on his left. Due either to boredom or untreated ADHD, his legs sometimes shook, vibrating my chair and annoying me. About halfway through the movie I felt a strange stillness; my neighbor's legs had stopped shaking, and he actually seemed interested in the movie, whispering the odd, excited comment or two to his much younger companion.
I doubt many fifty-plus-year-olds will rush out to see "Spider-Man 2," but if some do, they might be surprised to find that they relate to a web-slinging, wall-crawling superhero, but they shouldn't be surprised, however, if they swallow the tension of Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) as he admits an awful truth to his beloved aunt May (Rosemary Harris), or feel their hearts swell when Parker answers the call to duty by saving the life of a little girl, or suffer the sharp pangs of unrequited love as Parker watches Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst), his (not so) secret love, in the arms of another man. The last scene arouses even more pathos, if not irony, since Parker, continuing a theme from the first "Spider-man," believes he must keep himself distant from Mary Jane in order to protect her.
Normally in reviews one outlines the plot or at least gives a brief synopsis, but plot is almost superfluous when describing "Spider-man 2"--superfluous in the strictest sense of being more than what is needed or required. The plot could have come straight out of the pages of a Marvel comic book: Mad (or, to be politically correct, "aggravated") scientist undergoes horrendous transformation, kidnaps girl, threatens millions of lives, and can only be stopped by eponymous hero. Almost any good-guy/bad-guy scenario would have provided sufficient scaffolding. What the writers (Alfred Gough, Miles Millar, Michael Chabon, and Alvin Sargent--incidentally, the Hollywood system of giving screenwriting credit is notoriously murky in its rules and final attributions, so I list the contributors without giving anyone any more or less weight) have fleshed out, however, is the concerns of a young college student (Parker) trying to balance responsibilities at home (a widowed aunt struggling to keep her home), at school (he's failing his classes), on the job (when he has one), to his dead uncle (whose death he feels responsible for), to his best friend (who believes Spider-man killed his father), and to his true love (whom he loves too well to actually love). And he's the only one who can stop the mad scientist.
What allows the film to succeed, even in potentially ham-handed scenes as the villain cackling that no one can stop him, is the complete devotion of the cast and the filmmakers to Stan Lee's then-revolutionary idea that the most compelling heroes were not the Olympian half-gods or native sons of Krypton. Instead, he gave us Peter Parker, a nerdy teen-ager and social outcast whose entire pre-Spider-man life revolved around his school studies and the close orbit of his uncle and aunt who both raised and cared for him.
Hardly the mold for a great hero. But a hero he becomes in this movie, though not without reluctance, doubt, and several second-thoughts, and when he finally embraces the webbed mantle, we feel that he has come to his burden honestly. We can test the genuineness of this feeling in a scene where the almost-martyred Spider-man is borne aloft by the people he has just saved. The overt symbolism warns us that we should be on guard for the grand gesture and operatic. Instead, we feel his sacrifice even more acutely from the quiet and concerned reactions of the people to their fallen and vulnerable hero. That the filmmakers and actors can capture this between scenes of heady, computer-generated kineticism and somehow not lose momentum or the audience's attention results from judicious cutting of the "action" sequences and generous cutting of the dialogue and non-action scenes. Thus, we feel Peter Parker at his most vulnerable not in the tentacled grasp of his nemesis Doc Ock (Alfred Molina), but swallowing his words between furtive glances as he tries to answer Mary Jane about his love for her.
Though the movie's drama and tension result as much from the inaction as the action itself, the aerial and acrobatic fight sequences delight with both originality and detail. In an almost toss-away gesture, Spider-man retrieves Doc Ock's tossed-away victims and hoists them onto custom safety nets all while giving chase to his fleeing foe and avoiding his crushing tentacles. Another striking scene involving webs, this time with Mary Jane during a moonlit night, is far less busy, but no less dramatic, and calls to mind the poem "The Spider and the Fly."
I thank all involved with "Spider-man 2" for bringing to the screen a faithful comic-book adaptation. But more important, I thank them for bringing to life a modern myth and filling two hours of my life with drama, excitement, and the purest form of joy that only a ten-year-old without a care in the world can feel when he has lost himself in the pages of a comic-book.