Alasdair Stuart continues to follow the strands of Spider-Man’s 21st century web with the second Sam Raimi movie…

Two years after Norman Osborn’s death, Peter Parker is failing to balance his life as Spider-Man, a college student, a lab assistant and a nephew. Aunt May is getting evicted; Harry is obsessed with finding Spider-Man who he blames for the death of his father and Mary Jane is in an off-Broadway play. She and Peter are back as friends after Peter told her he doesn’t love her but as the old Parker luck kicks in yet again, that’s about to change…

Widely, and justifiably, regarded as one of the best superhero movies made in the West, Spider-Man 2 resolves a lot of the problems of the original but by no means all. Maguire is much, much better here and plays every element of Peter with the same slightly smarmy charm. He’s not afraid to give him a bit of an edge either, and the movie’s best dramatic beats come from the tension between Pete the hero and Pete the self-absorbed asshole.

That newfound calm and depth ties the movie together. Peter’s instant friendship with Alfred Molina’s superb Doctor Octavius initially tells us and him he can have both sides of his life. Molina is incredible here, and there’s a real sense of paternal pride to him. You can see that Otto sees a lot of himself in Peter and wants the young man to be his best self. When Otto is broken by the same tragedy Peter survived, the power dynamic shifts and, much like Ant-Man and the Wasp in later years, this becomes a superheroic rescue mission where the villain must be saved from himself as much as stopped. That harmonizes too with the movie riffing on the ‘Spider-Man no more’ plot, and another moment of surprising heroism for J. Jonah Jameson.

It’s smart, emotive, involving stuff and it’s tempered with the best action in the trilogy. Otto’s tentacles, run as puppets live on set with some CGI, have a burly muscularity to them that makes them enormously threatening long before they go wild. The moment they wake up and ‘save’ Otto from them being removed is the most overtly horrific sequence in the trilogy, complete with a chainsaw beat that’s a salute to all the Evil Dead fans in the audience.

There’s a willingness to play with three dimensions here too, which balances real sets with CGI in some very fun ways. To be clear, some of the CGI hasn’t aged well (and didn’t look that great at the time) but the intent of each scene remains hugely impressive. There’s a horizontal fight up, and down, and up a building that’s a franchise standout as well as the iconic train sequence and Otto’s final sacrifice. At these moments, the movie locks every element together and each one helps drive the whole thing even harder. That train scene is a great example, Maguire’s inherent slight goofiness and the humour of the scene tipping over into sincere effort, and mounting fear and finally perhaps the sweetest and most overwrought beat in the series as Peter is unmasked and the only response is ‘…he’s just a kid.’ Peter being carried in a cruciform position down the train is as subtle as a robotic tentacle to the head but the emotion behind it is completely sincere. This is the first movie where you see Peter adopted as New York’s hero and it’s really sweet.

All of this is enormously impressive. In yet another pleasant surprise so is how the movie treats MJ. As well as having at least some agency and being the single adult in the not-quite relationship with Peter, she feels rounded and complex in the way Harry never, ever does. It’s not perfect, and the slow motion run through New York in a wedding dress is incredibly over the top, but it’s more good work from Dunst.

Again, elements of the cast are the point of failure. Franco is actively bad here with little to do but unconvincingly glower and Donna Murphy is wasted as Rosie Octavius in a role so underwritten it may as well not be in the movie. Worst of all is Mr Ditkovitch, Peter’s comic relief Polish landlord and another callback to the 1960s and ’70s that just plays like old fashioned bigotry.  There’s also early hints of the multiple abandoned plans for the third movie with Daniel Gillies given absolutely nothing to do as Mary Jane’s fiancé, John Jameson.

If you can get past these beats though, this is the finest hour of the Maguire era and it’s one rife with surprising cameos. Joel McHale, Hal Sparks, Donnell Rawlings, Emily Deschanel, Reed Diamond, Aasif Mandvi, CSI: New York’s Vanessa Ferlito and more all have small meaningful roles.

Verdict: The result is a big, expansive movie that’s more than the sum of its parts and stands up, for the most part, even today. 8/10

Alasdair Stuart