Spiderman 2

Final­ly saw Spi­der­man 2, not that I real­ly want­ed to see it, but I was­n’t averse to it either. I did­n’t appre­ci­ate it so much for its sto­ry as for the auteuri­cal flour­ish­es that Sam Rai­mi brought for me. There might be a spoil­er or two to fol­low.

First, I went to the movie know­ing full well that Sam Rai­mi was the direc­tor and that he has direct­ed some of my favorite camp of all time. Yet I failed to real­ize just how well he has been able to make a high con­cept H‑film and still get in his punch­es. I have real­ized this now, most­ly because of Bruce Camp­bel­l’s ham cameo as an ass­hat ush­er. Then there was the shot of the new­ly revved up chain­saw pop­ping on to screen and many many shots of the ‘hys­ter­i­cal girl screams and runs toward the cam­era’ vari­ety.

This isn’t campy in a com­ic book flick. I found it to be the most enjoy­able part of the film. Dr. Octo­pus had the ubiq­ui­tous ‘over­ly com­pli­cat­ed tech­ni­cal machin­ery experiment/plot device used to cre­ate a dan­ger­ous sit­u­a­tion that Our Hero [in this case, Spi­der­man] can save the day from’ and his AI bio­me­chan­i­cal cyborg 4 arms are, of course, bent on evil when the tiny unpro­tect­ed inhibitor chip on the back of his neck get fried. I thought that was kind of dumb.

I also thought that Peter Park­er los­ing his pow­ers because of his inde­ci­sion as to what should be done with his life was non­sen­si­cal. But apart from that, I found myself iden­ti­fy­ing with him to an unusu­al­ly high extent. I don’t usu­al­ly iden­ti­fy heav­i­ly with any char­ac­ter, espe­cial­ly in an H‑film, but I found myself say­ing ‘damn I feel that way my own damn self.’

It is an enter­tain­ing flick, sur­pris­ing in the small points, with a few laugh out loud moments but alto­geth­er noth­ing fan­cy. It is worth a watch, but there real­ly isn’t a rea­son to go see it right away unless you want to be able to lis­ten to peo­ple talk about it.