Marvel Mondays #30 - Spiderman 2 (2004)

Every so often, in amongst the misfires, the messes and the films that only just about work, Marvel and DC manage to well and truly hit the nail on the head with a film. Of course, with the MCU in full flow in 2018, it's easy to forget that there was a time when Marvel were putting out a lot more misses than hits and the mid-noughties definitely had its fair share of films that promised a bit but failed massively to deliver - "Daredevil", "Men In Black 2", "Ghost Rider", "The Fantastic Four", the list goes on and on. It has to be said that in amongst a lot of the dreck of the time, "Spiderman 2" shines out like a beacon as if to say "Look, this is how you do it!"

Of course, it's fair to say that the first Spiderman film had already raised the bar a bit when it comes to superhero films (especially Marvel ones) but the second film is largely recognised as being the best of the five 21st century pre-MCU Spidey films - it grossed $1 billion worldwide and regularly gets cited as one of the best superhero films of all time even fourteen years later. Today, we're gonna see if that reputation is deserved.

Set two years after the first Spiderman film, it's fair to say that life has been anything but easy on Peter Parker since the events of his first silver screen outing. Trying to balance his duties as Spiderman, his university studies and working a series of low-paid part-time jobs (including occasionally getting some chump change from J Jonah Jamieson for contributing Spiderman pictures to the Daily Bugle, most of which are used to promote tabloid scare stories about Spidey to Peter's disgust) to ensure his rent gets paid on time, he's quickly finding out that life as a superhero crime fighter isn't all it's cracked up to be.

On top of this, his relationships with his old friends are suffering - Aunt May is facing eviction from her house and still grieving over Uncle Ben while Peter's old flatmate Harry Osborn has now moved back to the family home and has taken over the running of Oscorp following his father's death. He still blames Spiderman for this and has grown increasingly resentful towards Peter for remaining friends with Spidey.

MJ, meanwhile, has seen her acting career start to take off but since Peter rejected her in the first film the two of them have drifted apart and she has started dating Jamieson's son John, an astronaut with Peter lamenting MJ as "the one that got away" and realising he made a big mistake in turning her down. When Peter fails to turn up on time to see her play due to foiling a robbery as Spiderman and is refused entrance to the theatre by the doorman (Bruce Campbell again), she pretty much cuts him out of her life.

Harry discovers that Peter has been struggling with his assignments and offers to book him in for a chat with one of the new scientists at his lab Dr Otto Octavius who is putting together a new AI fusion programme to help him get some extra information in on his project. Peter and Otto hit it off and end up spending most of the afternoon talking with Octavius inviting him to the unveiling of the machine at Oscorp the next day.

Inevitably, the whole thing misfires with disastrous consequences - Otto has built a suit with four mechanical arms to control the power source plus an inhibitor chip to ensure that his intelligence overrides the arms' AI. Unfortunately the tritium he uses is much too powerful and causes a massive power outage, destroying the lab, killing Otto's wife and fusing the arms to Octavius' body while destroying the override chip.

Forced to flee from society, Octavius makes a new lair for himself down by the river. Driven mad by the arms' AI taking over his brain, he decides to recreate the experiment using even more power than before and pulls off a bank job to fund rebuilding his equipment. Peter and Aunt May are in the bank at the time and the latter is kidnapped. Peter quickly transforms into Spiderman and manages to rescue May although Doc Ock as he's now known still manages to get away with the loot. Inevitably, the paper the next day has Spiderman and Octo as new partners in crime...

Things officially come to a head for Peter when he asks Jamieson to give him a non-Spiderman related assignment for a change and is dispatched to cover a society ball to welcome John Jamieson home from his space mission. Peter has to photograph John proposing to MJ and then gets into a fight with Harry, who is even more drunk and bitter at Oscorp losing money over the Octo experiment and seeing Spiderman again, on his way out. To make things worse, he realises that the stress he's going through is also affecting his Spidey-powers often leaving him in life-threatening situations.

Frustrated and angry, Peter decides that the superhero life isn't worth it and throws his Spiderman suit in the rubbish, deciding to concentrate on being normal Peter Parker and leaving the crimefighting work to the police. However, with Octo plotting to unleash his city-destroying experiment and the crime rate soaring, how long can he realistically stay away? Well, you'll have to watch the film to find out as there's only so many spoilers I'm giving here...

If Spiderman was responsible for massively raising the bar when it came to superhero films then Spiderman 2 achieves the near impossible and actually manages to lift it even further and surpass its illustrious predecessor. A real emotional rollercoaster, you really do end up rooting for Peter/Spiderman as the ultimate underdog here - the guy suffers a hell of a lot throughout the course of the film but somehow it all just makes it so worthwhile when things start to go right for him and you can't help but cheer him on. Performance wise, pretty much everything is spot-on here as well with Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst and James Franco all keeping up their high standards from the first film and Alfred Molina doing a great job as Doc Ock as well. There's not a lot of pre-2008 Marvel films that can comfortably hold their own against the more acclaimed modern MCU work but Spiderman 2 is definitely up there with even the best from the more recent stuff.

Unfortunately when you're at the top the only way is down and as we'll see, Spidey's third outing saw the quality take a tumble with the result that the series was hastily (and unnecessarily in my opinion) rebooted with catastrophic results. But that's another moan for another time - suffice to say that in the unlikely event you haven't seen this one already, it's pretty much essential viewing and deservedly takes its place at the top of the Marvel Mondays leaderboard.

FINAL RATING: 🕸🕸🕸🕸🕸🕸🕸🕸🕸🕸 (10/10)

CURRENT MARVEL FILM TABLE

1. Spiderman 2 (2004) (10/10)
2. Spiderman (2002) (9/10)
3. X-Men 2 (2003) (8/10)
4. Men In Black (1997) (8/10)
5. X-Men (2000) (8/10)
6. Blade 2 (2001) (7/10)
7. Blade (1998) (7/10)
8. The Incredible Hulk Returns (1988) (6/10)
9. The Punisher (2004) (6/10)
10. Conan The Barbarian (1982) (6/10)
11. Conan The Destroyer (1984) (6/10)
12. The Trial Of The Incredible Hulk (1989) (6/10)
13. Men In Black 2 (2000) (6/10)
14. The Incredible Hulk (1977) (5/10)
15. Doctor Mordrid (1992) (5/10)
16. The Punisher (1989) (5/10)
17. Doctor Strange (1978) (5/10)
18. Nick Fury: Agent Of SHIELD (1998) (4/10)
19. The Fantastic Four (1994) (4/10)
20. Hulk (2003) (4/10)
21. Red Sonja (1985) (4/10)
22. Captain America 2: Death Too Soon (1979) (4/10)
23. Spiderman (1977) (4/10)
24. The Death Of The Incredible Hulk (1990) (3/10)
25. Spiderman: The Dragon's Challenge (1979) (3/10)
26. Howard The Duck (1986) (2/10)
27. Captain America (1990) (2/10)
28. Captain America (1979) (2/10)
29. Generation X (1996) (2/10)
30. Spiderman Strikes Back (1978) (2/10)
31. Daredevil (2003) (2/10)

NEXT WEEK: We take a look at "Blade Trinity" - will the dreaded third movie curse strike?