Product: Spider-Man 2 (2004)
Rating: 5.0
The best super hero movie I have ever seen
The important question is, do you like comic-book super-hero movies or not? If you do not, you might still like this movie, but probably not as much as you should. However, if you do, this is probably the best one ever made. Sam Raimi does a magnificent job with every aspect of this movie. He recaps the first movie in drawings over the opening titles, and away we go. The visual effects are much better than the first movie and the story line is more involved and, being Spider-Man, still achingly sad in a teen-age angst comic-book sort of way.Here I am thinking of Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) gazing from the stage at Peter's empty theater seat, not knowing that poor Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) is indeed at the theater, being kept out by an overly officious usher. It is touching in the way it is handled. These are good actors portraying these roles. It is an outlandish story, but played as if they were real people and all this exotic reality were perfectly normal.Spider-Man and Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina is especially terffic) battle it out in terrific sequences, as they did in the original stories. It is interesting how they create him in this film. Of course, the whole story is preposterous. That is not the point. You have to get past that before the film starts. There is a sequence on an elevated train that is absolutely superb. If you quibble about it not being even marginally possible in any universe, you should just go home and put on a t-shirt that says, "I don't know how to have any fun at all."Really.