Why the first Spider-Man made so much money I could never understand. It lacked really fiery action, and, I thought, relied far too heavily on the wimpy appeal of Tobey Maguire in the lead role and the romantic complications of Spider-Man alter ego Peter Parker’s life. It was better than superhero stinkers such as Ben Affleck’s Daredevil, yes, but also much less interesting and thrilling than even the stolid 1978 Superman, which had a certain epic grandeur, or the 1989 Batman, suffused as it was with Tim Burton’s dark Gothic sensibility and offbeat humour, let alone the stupendous, culturally up-to-the-minute X-Men movies of recent years.
Spider-Man II, inevitably, is the first Spider-Man movie with a few more knobs on. The action is somewhat better, though the computer-generated Spider-Man does often look rather stiff and, well, computer-generated. At least he has an impressive opponent in Dr Octopus (Alfred Molina), who gets himself harnessed to the most marvellously serpentine mechanical arms. Their fights are okay, but there are too few of them. The opening sequence, in which poor overworked Peter Parker flips into Spider-Man mode in a desperate attempt to deliver a stack of pizzas on time, has more genuine excitement in it than the rest of the film put together. Unless it was just the fact that at the start I was as yet unwearied by movie’s non-action plotting.
The spin that director Sam Raimi and scriptwriter Alvin Sargent are trying to put on the genre is to humanise the cartoon protagonist, which means putting him (in his normal-guy mode) under considerable pressure vis-à-vis his love life and his work life. He can’t tell anyone who he is when he’s not Peter Parker, and he’s working as well as studying, so when he’s not doing his Spider-Man thing he’s an ordinary Schmo suffering like everyone else, perhaps more so.
We’re supposed to feel sorry for Peter/Spidey right from the start. The first movie ended with his tearfully declining to confess his love to Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst), for fear of putting her in danger, and the tension thus set up is one the filmmakers milk right to the end of Spider-Man II. Peter is overworked and is flunking out of college because he keeps getting distracted by people he has to save from something.
The fact that Spider-Man was responsible for the death of the father of Peter’s best friend, Harry Osborn (James Franco), is another little piece of dramatic irony the filmmakers keep harping on, until they simply cannot sustain it any longer. At any rate, Peter/Spider-Man clearly has sufficient emotional trauma and confusion going on in his life to propel at least one full season of a soap opera.
It is this manipulatively melodramatic element that overpowers the film. It’s all very well to want to give a superhero a human dimension, and Maguire’s childish, vulnerable quality, along with those large, soulful eyes, help considerably to further this ambition. But it doesn’t really add emotional depth; it just adds melodrama, unsupported by any tangible human texture, and it adds sentimentality. This may be the most sentimental comic-book superhero movie ever made.
The number of allegedly heart-rending scenes is very high; each of the main characters, one after the other, gets a chance to loom at the camera with his or her eyes brimming with tears. It’s like a particularly intense episode of Dr Phil. Maguire’s enormo-globes, of course, are perpetually damp and rimmed with pink, as though he were about to weep or had just had a good cry in a secluded phone-booth somewhere.
Gazing cold-heartedly at all this brimming emotion, waiting for the next action sequence, I began to develop a theory about the underlying meaning of Spider-Man II. It is, I think, even unconsciously, grappling with the idea of the closet — as in the piece of imaginary furniture gay men have to emerge from. Which is not to say Spidey’s a moffie, but the metaphor holds.
He, like his antagonists in the movies, has an alternate identity thrust upon him — an identity that, in 1950s style, they all have to hide. Peter Parker becomes Spider-Man when bitten by a radioactive spider; then he has to conceal this other, more powerful identity, from those he loves. He has, indeed, to conceal his love. His foes have similar issues: Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe) in the earlier movie became the Green Goblin, despite himself, when he put on the evil mask — there was even a tortured dialogue between man and mask. Molina, in Spider-Man II, becomes Dr Octopus when his self-created technology turns on him and he is consumed by it. This villainy-despite-themselves, naturally, gives such characters a moment of tearful self-recognition at the end, and a chance to demonstrate that the good guy is still in there somewhere.
This kind of identity theme is one X-Men and X-Men II dealt with in a couple of witty scenes, instead of hammering it like a kettledrum, so that may have given me the idea. But no one in Spider-Man II, except perhaps Mary Jane (and we’ve had enough of Dunst doing her soulful stare) or Peter’s fount-of-wisdom aunt (Rosemary Harris), both of whom are tiresome, is a properly integrated personality. And perhaps that’s why, as a sentimental hybrid of superhero action and Dr Phil melodrama, it is in no way a properly integrated movie.