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Spider Man’s films have all exceeded two hours in length — Spider- Man 2 clocks in at 128 minutes — whereas, at 134 mins, X2 is a full half-hour longer than either the first and third installments or XO:W, a factor that can’t be discounted in determining if it will emerge victorious over its bug-eyed foe.

The Man in the Director’s Chair

Both sequels featured helmers returning from the first go-around — Sam Raimi and Bryan Singer. Raimi already had previous experience with a Chapter Two (eventually trilogy), guiding his Evil Dead antihero Ash out of the ‘80s and into the ‘90s, and he had dabbled in many different genre mashups in the ten years previous to Spider-Man: Southern gothic horror, revisionist Western, modern noir, sports/romance. Still, it was a big risk and leap of faith for Columbia Pictures entrusting the fate of a $150 million franchise launch in the hands of a man who, onscreen, had once had a tree attempt to rape a woman.

What Raimi did bring was an attunement to a comic-book sensibility, an ability to communicate a world of information and emotion with key bold images and visuals, an offbeat sense of humor, and a willingness to take the characters seriously without freighting the whole production down with the onus of being a BIG WOULD-BE BLOCKBUSTER. Since Spider-Man, Raimi has helmed only one non-Spidey flick, the justifiably awesome horror pic, Drag Me to Hell, which made my list of the best films of the past decade.

Singer only had three features under his belt, including the career-launching The Usual Suspects and the unsuccessful but unnerving Apt Pupil, before tackling X-Men, but he carried a genuine love for the source material coupled with an appreciation and affinity for how mutants can be metaphorically read as any “minority” or disenfranchised group of people who feel unable to be accepted for who they are, and must choose between remaining hidden in the shadows or stepping out into the open, working within the world that judges them, or seeking vengeance. After X2, Singer attempted to invigorate another comic book franchise with the flawed Superman Returns, followed by a slam-bang return to form with Valkyrie (which shows Singer’s touch in how it adapts many themes from the X-Men world into its depiction of a real-life WWII plot by Hitler’s countrymen to assassinate him.

Wet Kirsten Dunst

Just seeing if you are paying attention! It was a memorable moment in the first film, a drenched Mary Jane Watson sharing a sexy smooch with a hanging upside down Spidey, so the thought probably was, “Can we find a way to get water on her again?” A team of writers, including Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon and Academy-Award winning/half-century Hollywood veteran Alvin Sargent, does not disappoint in that regard.

This category is a trifle unfair, seeing as how Ms. Dunst is not in X2, but the latter film does feature Rebecca Rojmin-Stamos, out of her Mystique outfit briefly, in a scene that illustrates the truism that any man, no matter how unattractive, will throw all such relativism out the window when a hot chick sidles on over from the bar, wraps her legs around him, and suggests getting busy in a bathroom stall. This proves doubly so if she comes bearing beer.

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