This sequel is set a year after the original Spiderman film with Peter having moved out of Aunt May's house and got his own flat while still splitting his time between working at the Daily Bugle as a photographer and studying at college. The only other characters to return from the original film are Peter's boss at the Bugle J Jonah Jamieson (though it's a different actor playing the part this time) and Michael Pataki as Captain Barbera, Parker's contact at the NYPD (sensible as he was one of the better things about the first film).
The plot then - one of Peter's science lecturers announces to his class that he has managed to procure some plutonium to help with the experiments he's doing which raises the ire of a trio of CND type students who plot to steal the plutonium as a way to make a statement as to how dangerous nuclear material is. Um yeah, you can already see that this thing's gonna have more plot holes than a Swiss cheese can't you?
Meanwhile, Spiderman's heroics have attracted the attention of a reporter from the national Examiner paper called Gail Hoffman who turns up at the Bugle asking if she can shadow Peter for a bit to hopefully get an interview with Spiderman. Cue ninety minutes of Parker pretty much pulling excuses out of his arse about why you never see him and Spidey in the same place at the same time. Fairly amusing the first time, less so by about the 16th...
Anyway, the CND student types steal the plutonium from the lab. Spiderman goes to stop them but he arrives too late and only succeeds in getting seen leaving the building by the security guards making him (and by extension Peter who everyone assumes is Spidey's best mate) number one suspect in the case. The students are expecting the story to be a big panic front page headline but it ends up being relegated to page 10 on the Bugle with an expert commenting that the plutonium isn't really dangerous anyway. Rather than accepting that they should really just give the f**k up at this point, they decide to make their point as to how dangerous the stuff is by building a nuclear bomb using their flat which just so happens to have a handy laboratory capable of handling nuclear waste in it.
Okay, let's just take a rain check here - this has got to be the stupidest plot to a film that I've ever come across. Peace-loving hippy students steal nuclear waste and then decide to build a bomb from it to demonstrate that nuclear waste is bad. Oh and they've managed to set up a lab for building stuff with plutonium in one of them's flat on a student budget. It's...just...GGGAAAHHHH! HOW DID THIS FILM EVER GET MADE WITHOUT SOMEONE SAYING THIS IS F**KING STUPID?! Anyway, yes, sorry - word gets out about the robbery to an LA-based villain called Mr White (who looks more like Burt Reynolds as dressed by Colonel Sanders than a Spiderman baddie) who decides to head from his holiday home in Switzerland (!) across to New York and nick some of the waste for himself.
Unsurprisingly, he succeeds as one of the students ends up falling ill with radiation poisoning (duh) and has to be taken to the hospital by the other two. With the cops initially having arrested Peter, he ends up released with an apology after they turn themselves in but the incident still results in him being fired from the Bugle. Meanwhile, with the nuclear-lab-in-a-flat unattended, White's goons simply waltz in and take the bomb. Spiderman attempts to stop them but only ends up getting thrown off a roof by one of them and saving himself by spinning a web across the alley to break his fall before placing a transmitter bug on their getaway car.
We're about halfway through the film now but the rest of it is such a non-event that I'm gonna skim through it quickly for the sake of all our sanities. Peter and Gail track White back to LA with Jamieson tagging along to keep an eye on them (having given Peter his job back and on the premise that he gets a major scoop out of it). They get involved in a car/bike chase with White's two thugs (a big seven foot bloke and the most inept karate henchman you ever did see) and, having already got into a scrap with them twice in New York, fight them about three more times, first on an old Wild West movie set, then in a music studio and finally at White's mansion. The fight scenes are pretty much interchangable and dull as ditchwater to be honest.
In the meantime, Gail gets kidnapped and forced to lounge around the pool in a bikini by White prior to Spidey finally turning up and defeating the thugs at about the fifth attempt. He doesn't even manage to catch White who has taken the bomb downtown and left it on a building next to the stadium where the President is due to give a big speech that day. Spidey flies in on a helicopter, jumps on to the top of the building and defuses the bomb about three minutes after White has left and about five seconds before it's due to go boom. That's it. No big final showdown, no villain getting brought to justice, just a bloke defusing a bomb on top of a tower block. Talk about the most anticlimactic movie ending ever...
Overall judgment - good lord this film is BAD. Even ignoring the 40 odd years of cinematic progress since it was made, it just seems to have taken all the bad bits from the first Spiderman and made them ten times worse. Loads of padding? Check. Repetitive fight scenes? Check. Underwhelming villain who looks more like he belongs in a Starsky and Hutch episode? Check. Add to that the stupid ending which doesn't resolve anything and this one's a real stinker frankly. There would be one more Spiderman film before ABC dropped the series and we'll be dealing with it in a couple of weeks' time. Let's just say I'm not getting my hopes up...
FINAL RATING: 🕸🕸 2/10
CURRENT MARVEL FILM TABLE
1. Doctor Strange (1978) (5/10)
2. Spiderman (1977) (4/10)
3. Spiderman Strikes Back (1978) (2/10)
NEXT WEEK: Captain America - the campervan years!
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