With the stunning success of Spider-Man (the first movie to make over $100million in its opening weekend, outstripping the previous record at the time set by Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) a sequel was never in doubt, though for a time its star was, after Maguire suffered injuries on another film set. Nonetheless, everyone managed to return for another go as Spidey faced off against another classic member of his villain’s gallery, Doctor Otto Octavius, played by Alfred Molina. Could Raimi make lightning strike twice?

Two years after the events of Spider-Man, Peter Parker struggles to balance a sense of duty with the lies he must constantly tell the people he loves, and the pain it causes them and him. When his powers begin to sporadically fail him, he wonders whether it might not be time to hang up the Spidey-suit, but with a new villain threatening the city, can Peter really walk away from his great responsibility?

A confession – I never felt that Spider-Man 2 was as strong as its predecessor. Among my peers and the critics of the day, this made me somewhat of an odd man out. Partly this is because I like origin stories, partly it was because of what felt at the time like full-throated American patriotism being shoved down my throat by almost every frame of the movie, and partly it’s just that a lot of what worked in the first movie gets recycled here without much change. It’s not that I ever thought Spider-Man 2 was a bad movie, just that I preferred the first.

Sitting down for this rewatch, I found little to change my mind – in fact I actually felt that the movie came off worse than I remembered overall, although the patriotism didn’t feel as invasive for whatever reason. Still, I have to give respect to Raimi for the brutal way in which he deconstructs his central hero here, making Parker suffer for almost the entire run time what most superheroes generally have to endure for at most a single Act of their movie.

So it’s two years since the end of the last movie, Peter is now a college student living alone in a tiny, grotty apartment in the city, working a part time job delivering pizza and still going out as Spidey to fight crime every time he hears the blare of sirens. In a telling establishing shot as the credits end, we see a drawing of Mary Jane turn into a billboard picture of the character advertising perfume, as Peter monologues about how he sees her like that every day. This may as well be a deliberate metaphor for the entire arc of MJ’s character here – a simple object for Peter to stare at as he pontificates on the unfairness of not being able to be happy with the girl he loves because of his great responsibility, regardless of how she might actually feel on the matter because he’s already made his mind up for her that it’s too dangerous. In a silver age comic book this might have been perceived by readers as noble. In a mid-noughties blockbuster it’s a sad reflection of how little the medium had moved on, and how badly served lead actresses like Dunst were in vehicles like this.

At any rate, Peter is not having fun. He’s separated from the girl he loves, living hand to mouth, unable to hold down a steady job for too long and constantly behind at college. The only thing he seems able to do right is be Spider-Man, although the Daily Bugle still insists on painting him as a criminal menace thanks to the efforts of J Jonah Jameson. As the first hour or so of the film grinds on, it inflicts misery after misery on Peter, crushing him beneath the weight of so many various issues and problems that you start to wonder if you’re ever going to see any sort of triumph occur in the film at all.

Of course, then the movie hits that mid-point stride, where Peter elects to give up the suit and be a real boy. There’s a montage where the tune ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head’ plays as we see the newly unburdened Peter walking along happily, buying a hot dog, ignoring police sirens as they go past, inexpertly repairing his moped, doing some homework and attending class. Buried under the heavy-handedness of a lot of its metaphor, there’s a decent idea in here about the fluctuation of his powers being a direct result of the unhappiness and uncertainty that Peter feels about so much of his life, that it’s a mental rather than a physical failure, an issue of self-belief. The issue is that it’s handled poorly and also – more importantly – this is a conflict that the character already went through in the first movie. Peter starts that first entry as a loner nerd who can barely speak to the girl he has a desperate crush on and is socially awkward. Then he becomes Spider-Man and gains confidence through a host of new found abilities, which gets tempered by an extreme emotional journey which centres on the death of his Uncle being caused by his own momentary selfishness. The self-doubt is erased through that trauma, as he steps up to become the hero he feels he should be, and this film gives us no new reason for it to return, just the same old ones (guilt over the suffering of Aunt May alone, agonising over not getting the girl, awkwardness with Harry). In fact, the one new trauma which one feels should be causing any sort of self-doubt/drama to our hero is the death of his friend’s father at his own hands and the duplicity of knowing that man was a bad person, but also not wanting to cause further pain to his friend. Unfortunately, a combination of a hammy, phoned-in performance from Franco and a willingness to largely ignore the issue from Parker’s side by the script combine to make this a non-starter. Peter is far more concerned Mary Jane might get whacked by a bad guy if he allows himself to love her than he is about the small matter of the homicide.

But repetition is sort of the bread and butter of the film, thematically speaking. Take Octavius, our new villain. Another brilliant, driven, ruthlessly ambitious individual who ends up broken by his own creation and has his own agency in the matter of his villainous actions conveniently removed by circumstance so that he can be given a fallen hero story arc. This absence of responsibility for the villain grates somewhat when it’s basically a retread of what went before – the moment the film shows you the ‘inhibitor chip’ for the robotic arms apparatus you know it’s going to end up broken – but also the way in which the story unfolds is weirdly ham-fisted, as if the director knew the end point he wanted and fudged something he hoped would sound clever to try and make it work. Why are the robot arms evil? Why are they sentient at all? Why would a set of tools designed to operate at additional arms and ‘connected to the cerebral cortex’ need any sort of artificial intelligence? Again, there’s a sense that a better possibility for the narrative arc exists here – that Octavius’ own brilliance and hubris are turned inwards by the twin factors of the unspeakable tragedy of losing the love of his life and the unthinkable eventuality of his failure and that the dark reaction to both is amplified by a sense of power granted to him by his new ‘limbs’. But the movie skirts only lightly with that idea, instead seeming to settle more firmly on the notion that the arms are evil and once the inhibitor chip is gone they drive his quest to repeat his experiment and commit a lot of crimes in the process to get what he needs. There isn’t even consistency in the way the character behaves – he robs a bank, for example, to fund the new equipment that he needs, then pays a visit to Harry and agrees to grab Spider-Man for him in return for being given the element he needs from Harry’s safe. Why not simply torture Harry until he gives him what he needs? Why not tear open the personal safe the element is kept in, seeing as how we just witnessed him tear a bank vault open with the robot arms? Overall, it plays like a second-rate attempt at repeating the Norman Osborn character without being quite so obvious as to call him Corman Fosborn, and despite Molina’s much-praised onscreen charisma in the role, the writing badly lets it down.

But Molina isn’t alone in being horribly let down by the script here – there’s enough disappointment to go around for everyone, starting with Kirsten Dunst. Watching this back, I realised just how comparatively worse this second instalment manages to treat her character. In the first film, she’s essentially there as a trophy, to be passed from one character to the next until finally being rejected by Peter. In this one, she gets to be a success (we are told) because she’s on a billboard and in a play, but her entire life revolves around whether or not Peter loves her. Even though he consistently lets her down, messes her around, tells her he loves her and then that he doesn’t. Even though she is literally engaged to be married to someone else, all the run time of the movie is her pouting at Peter for not being there, while pining for him when he isn’t. The only other activity in which the script allows her to engage is screaming, which she does loudly and often, but otherwise she’s simply a doll, glassy-eyed and dutifully sitting in wait for her man. Even at the end of the movie, as she runs out of her wedding an appears at Peter’s door to declare her love and ask that he respect her choice to face the dangers he’s arbitrarily decided he must shield her from, the moment he hears sirens she just shrugs ‘go get ’em, tiger’ and he’s off, leaving her to wait alone for him once more. I’d say it’s on a par with Amy Adams’ treatment in Batman v Superman, but at least in that movie, Lois Lane gets to actually do things beyond whining about her boyfriend. Not many, I’ll grant, but more than MJ gets here.

Thematically, this seems to be an issue the film has with its female characters generally. Octavius’ wife Rosie is pretty much just a smiling cipher – all I can tell you about her is that she studied English Literature and is married to Otto. It doesn’t matter though because of the three scenes in which she appears, one is her death and the other two set her as a sort of nice, agreeable piece of set dressing there to promote the idea that our villain has a heart. Fridged before she’s in any danger of developing a personality or any sense of agency, we are left in no doubt of her importance as a narrative device and nothing more. Even the redoubtable Aunt May is reduced here to a fussing busybody. We don’t see May do anything but suffer, yet each time that suffering is framed in terms of its impact on Peter. When she’s kidnapped by Octavius, the movie wants us to know that the important thing is her opinion of Spider-Man. When Peter tearfully confesses that he is responsible for Ben’s death, it’s Peter’s suffering at the reaction of May on which the movie chooses to focus (going so far as to have May dismiss it later, so that we know Peter is forgiven – phew). When May is being forced out of her home, the important thing is how badly Peter feels about not being able to help her because of his Big Responsibility (though then when he shirks that by hanging up the suit, we are not shown one second of him helping her, and when he does finally go to visit her, she basically persuades him he should be Spider-Man again). Raimi is not a director known for positive portrayals of female characters in his movies, and it seems that the natural historic tendency of the genre to cast them as damsels to be saved or mother figures to be protected suited his style well. Hell, the daughter of Peter’s landlord is clearly carrying a torch for him, yet all she is there to be is another piece of set dressing (and at one point a messaging service).

But that’s not to say that the male cast get much better from a script which seems to confuse hammering on a single trait with improvement. Remember that nuance Simmons brought to the role of Jameson in the first movie? Gone. Here, Jameson is simply a blowhard bully, a caricature so shallow that he literally goes directly from a moment of apparent self-reflection at his role in the demise of Spider-Man one moment to calling him a thief and a menace the very next second when he reappears and reclaims his suit. The rest of his screen time is basically dedicated to reminding you how much of a dead-eyed asshole he is, whether it’s treating his staff with utter contempt, hobnobbing with the social elite for photo ops or immediately telling his wife to call the caterer and tell them not to open the caviar as it becomes clear that his son – of whom he claims to be so proud – has just been left at the altar. Jameson in the first movie was hard-nosed and mean, but here he transcends into outright cruelty, and there remains nothing of the character to even slightly like.

Then there’s Harry. Clearly since the death of his father, he’s dropped out of college and taken on the mantle of running Oscorp. Driven by a fierce hatred of Spider-Man who apparently slaughtered his father, once again Franco is required to walk a tightrope line he just can’t manage effectively, although in fairness to him this time I don’t think there is any actor who could. Alternately feeling affection for his friend Peter and frustration that he won’t give up the identity of the man who killed his father and drives his all-consuming quest for vengeance. These are two incompatible character traits at best – the fact that Harry goes from attending his friend’s birthday party to sulkily pouting that he won’t tell him who Spider-Man is just shows how ill-equipped the script is to deal with them. At any rate, why are these two even friends anymore? Harry wants Spidey dead and Peter is famously Spidey’s personal photographer. Harry was always jealous of the esteem in which his father held Peter. Harry knows that Peter is in love with MJ, and she him. The two have nothing at all in common, yet still are apparently best friends with a frisson of tension over, well, everything. It’s narratively odd, and reduces Franco to just amplifying everything to eleven, overdoing both the ecstasy of being on the verge of great things for the company and the anger at Spider-Man so he too becomes a caricature, and a poor one of his own father. There’s maybe an argument here that this is intentional narrative shadowing, but if it is, it’s not well done.

What the re-watch brought home to me then, is that this is a film relying on visual splendour. There is one scene in this movie which rivals the alleyway kiss of the first for being the iconic moment everyone remembers – the stopping of the train and specifically Peter waking up surrounded by people and realising he is not wearing his mask, before a young boy hands it back to him assuring him ‘we won’t tell nobody’ to the nods of the rest of the assembly. It’s a powerful visual, indeed a powerful moment for a character whose struggles and neuroses are so intimately tied to identity and his need to protect it. It’s also probably the only scene in the film which carries actual weight and heft relating to its subject matter, and this is likely why it endures in the memory long after most of the rest of it fades. Other things I had locked in my memory were Mary Jane running from her wedding, Doc Ock throwing a car at Parker through a window and Aunt May speechifying on the virtues of heroes. It’s that sort of movie – visual splendour and occasional moments of genuine impact conspiring to glaze over a slightly dull, repetitive retread of the original themes which lacks most of the depth and nuance afforded to the characters in that entry.

I began by confessing I had never liked this film as much as the first at the time of release. I end by acknowledging that there were reasons for that way beyond whatever logic me of 14 years and far less movie-analysing experience produced at the time. Thematically unadventurous, with a script which lets down everyone but nobody more than the women, this is the sort of sequel where it just feels like everyone turned up for the money. There’s no real passion on display from either the cast or the script, and the movie tries to cover it with pretty visuals and snark. Not one for the ages, then, and certainly not up to the standards of the current crop of MCU entries. Like Mary Jane, I find myself consistently disappointed by Peter Parker here.