Dull, overlong and unconvincing.

Rating: 5/10 (27 July 2014)

After sitting through this endurance test, I'm consoling myself with the fact that, in maybe five to ten years time, they will reboot the franchise again and have another go at getting it right.
Spiderman 2 is about forty minutes too long. There is so much unnecessary backstory and drivel in here that it is painful to sit through. I mean, if we didn't know Spiderman's story to death thanks to the fact that we've had now five movies in twelve years essentially rehashing the same story, it wouldn't be so bad. But we have had those movies. Even if you hated the Tobey Maguire trilogy, you still remember the story, right? So why do they feel the need to go over the same ground again and again is beyond me. Perhaps they think that ten years equates to a "new generation" of movie-goers. I don't know.
Anyway, what you do get is one hundred and forty minutes of same old, same old. Same old angst-driven spidey not knowing whether he wants the girl or not. Yawn.
As far as villains go, they couldn't even leave green goblin to die. They had to resurrect him in the form of his son. I have no idea whether this is canon in the comics or not, but it is a cheap way to bring back an old character.
Whilst I'm on about cheap writing... is there no one writing screenplays anymore that don't have dialogue and scenes you can predict well in advance? I mean, if I know what a character is going to say before they say it, despite being distracted by shiny CGI and technowizardry, what does that say about how long it took the writer to come up with the crap? When I sat down to watch this, I realised that I couldn't remember a single thing that happened in the previous movie and, I suspect the same will be true when I inevitably go and watch Spiderman 3. They are just watch and forget movies.
The one thing that they sort of got right was spidey's humour, at least in the first ten minutes. After that, there was precious little to smile about, let me tell you! CGI is abundant, of course and, at least for the characters, not too shabby. Apart from being a clone of Mr Freeze from the Batman movies, Electro looked the part.
Where the CGI scored less well, however, is in my favourite pet hate... physics abuse. Spiderman swings about on his webs with ridiculous speed. It's like he is rocket propelled half the time, even when simply falling straight down. Also, I get he's virtually indestructible, but Gwen isn't. There is a scene where he swoops down on his web and snatches her from a standing position and swoops away, all with out stopping. Not only would that have killed her then and there from the impact, but his speed would have dropped considerably. Does no one look at this and think "You know what...that's stupid." during the film-making process? The plot was a mess. The dialogue trite and cheesy in equal measure and the characterisations were woeful. Not since Anakin Skywalkers ineptly orchestrated turning to the dark-side have I seen such awful ham-fisted about-faces for character motivations. Mild mannered techno-nerd Max becomes evil Electro simply because Spiderman forgot his name. Harry Osborne goes from Peter Parker's best friend to psychotic lunatic in the blink of an eye.
It's all rather tragic, really. But the real tragedy, considering how many people put at least some effort into it, is this: Even now, mere hours after watching it, the details are hazy. I might suspect early-onset Alzheimer's, except that I can recall with painful clarity even other poor recent movies such as Godzilla. So this tells me that Spiderman 2 will be a movie forgotten in ten years time. No one will be able to tell you what happened in it without looking it up.
And you know what? Perhaps that is for the best.
SUMMARY: Dull, too long and instantly forgettable. People will be talking about this film for minutes after they have left the theatre. Almost any other superhero movie is more enjoyable.