Spider-Man 2 Review

The reason this holds its reputation is the ordinary half. Raimi spends the first act on a man who cannot keep a pizza delivery job, and the powers flicker because his life is falling apart, which is a better idea than the genre has had since. Alfred Molina plays Doc Ock as a decent man wearing a mistake, and the hospital scene, shot with the horror instincts Raimi never really put away, is the best sequence in either of these films. The train fight remains the argument for practical staging, because a crowd holds him up, unmasked, and the picture treats that as the climax it is.

What keeps it short of the very top sits around the edges. The dialogue stiffens whenever the plot has to be explained, the Harry material is placeholder work for a third film, and Kirsten Dunst is asked to be an obstacle more often than a person. The digital work has aged unevenly, though the compositing is better than its reputation. Twenty years of superhero pictures have not improved on the central idea, which is that the job costs something.