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Give It Up for the Villains

Spider-Man 2 continues in the vein of the first film, focusing on another man of science (and mentor/role model of Peter Parker) who winds up destroyed by his creation and transmuted from a benign force into an arch villain who threatens the city’s inhabitants. (On a side note, it seemed to me that the only way the third film could and should go would be to have Dr. Connors, the last of Peter’s positive father figures, assume the mantle of the Lizard. Dylan Baker’s performance in the first two films seems geared towards just this. Alas, we get three brand-new villains, evil space goo, and a musical number.) Alfred Molina only has a few scenes as Dr. Octavius to make a warm and lasting impression and he utterly succeeds. I felt even more empathy for him than I did for Willem Dafoe’s descent into Green Goblin-hood.

As William Stryker, military man gone mad in the X2 universe, the irreplaceable character actor Brian Cox is as cold and steely as his salt and pepper beard. Using his own son as a pawn in a plan to wipe out all the mutants of the world, manipulating an attack on the President in order to further his own agenda, using that badgering superior voice of his to wear down any who might get in his way, the foundation of his actions is not entirely without sympathy, but the means he pursues to reach his ends begin to rise from distressing to globally destructive.

Final Analysis

The key distinction between X2 and Spider-Man 2 is that the former is a damn fine comic book movie that finds time for its characters in the midst of incredible action and benefits from a strong directorial vision, and the latter is a work of art that just happens to have a superhero as its main character. X2 is dark but hopeful, over plotted but steady in its course, fierce in its violence but also in its tenderness, cast so well with such archetypically perfect character/actor fits that it doesn’t matter whether they have enough to do sometimes, it’s fun just to watch them all inhabit their universe.

What few complaints I could lodge against Spider-Man 2 — the fittingness of that Dashboard Confessional song after the overwhelmingly Emo tone of the first half-hour, a slight sense of narrative wheel-spinning — melt away in the face of how much I enjoy the film each time I watch it. From the comic book panel highlights that recap the first film’s plot, to Raimi’s multiple Evil Dead nods, to the decision to cast two hosts of E’s The Soup, it finds sincerity and couples it with a friendly wink, presents drama and balances it with a gratuitous jiggle shot, champions redemption, and has the balls to push for the happy ending, and then push past that for a gloriously ambivalent final shot. What comes after “happily ever after?” Oddly enough, it looks a lot like what came before...

Next time: Chapter Two delves into a months-long sub-theme I am calling “Long Time Coming.” These are sequels that came anywhere from 13 to 30 years later. In the next three months, I’ll look at the second cinematic chapters of a pool shark, a compulsive killer, a business tycoon, a videogame designer, and the unheralded follow-ups to an eight-time Oscar nominee from 1971 and an 11-time nominee from 1983.

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