Webs of thrill
Mark Kermode

BACK in the early 80s, the UK distributor of director Sam Raimi’s fabulous feature debut, The Evil Dead, faced prosecution under the British Obscene Publications Act. The allegation was that its product, with its endless scenes of zombies being bashed with shovels, picks and chainsaws, demonstrated a tendency to "deprave and corrupt" audiences. Despite Raimi’s insistence that the film was less an exercise in terror than a Three Stooges-style slapstick comedy, with blood and offal standing in for custard pies, numerous courts returned guilty verdicts against video dealers supplying it. Although Raimi has spent much of the past 20 years quietly worming his way into the bosom of mainstream movie-making (his most recent ventures include the classy thriller A Simple Plan, and baseball movie For Love of the Game), there’s still something wickedly amusing about the fact that a former ‘goremeister’ and purveyor of alleged obscenity is now the director of one of the most successful `family friendly’ movie franchises of all time.

Yet far from going soft or selling out, Spider-Man 2 finds the still rebellious Raimi delivering a blockbusting hit which digs deep into his own disreputable film-making past, recalling the violent, comic-strip comedy of the underrated Crimewave and the cheerful chills of Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn to create a subversive romp every bit as sticky and twisted as one of its arachnid hero’s webs.

Picking up two years after the close of the first instalment, Spider-Man 2 finds the lovelorn Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) still trying to complete his academic studies while working as a pizza-delivery boy and selling snaps of his Spider-Man alter-ego to the Daily Bugle.

The story presents the familiar spectre of a reluctant superhero torn between devotion to his crime-fighting duties and a desire for a normal life.

"Am I not supposed to have what I want?" wonders Peter, as the uncontrollable gooey ejaculations of the original Spider-Man give way to yarn-spinning impotence, his jouissance now spent as he topples web-less from yet another giant erection.

All Peter wants to do is to dump the jumpsuit and get on with being a young student in love, a decision backed up by a friendly shrink who thinks his wall-crawling dreams are nothing more than an adolescent identity crisis.

Yet early retirement becomes impossible when Alfred Molina’s Doctor Otto Octavius descends into tentacled madness after accidentally hot-wiring an assortment of mechanical limbs into his spinal column. At the heart of the film’s dark charm is the genuine sense of pain conveyed by the doe-eyed Maguire as he wrestles with his secret love for Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst), whose affections he shuns for fear of causing her harm.

On one level, this could be seen as simply a rerun of Superman II, an altogether more frivolous superhero sequel in which Clark Kent relinquished his super-powers to woo Lois Lane, conveniently widening the box-office appeal in the process.
Yet a closer reference point may be Raimi’s own 1990 epic Darkman, a comic-book-inflected tale of an avenging angel whose face-changing powers allow him to fight crime but simultaneously destroy his love life. The bond between Liam Neeson’s Peyton Westlake and Maguire’s Peter Parker is the palpable anguish both experience as their alter-egos come between them and the object of their affections. Although Parker is able to pull off the Spider-Man mask at will, like his cursed predecessor, he soon begins to wonder whether he still has a face of his own underneath.

Impressively, Raimi and screenwriter Alvin Sargent, whose previous credits include Ordinary People and Unfaithful, manage to keep this emotional dilemma to the fore even as the zip-zang-boom visuals of Spider-Man 2 spiral into comic-book chaos, and the slapstick antics attain ever giddier heights of absurdity.

On the downside, I’m still not entirely convinced by the CGI Spidey who sweeps digitally through the skyscrapers of New York, trespassing into areas of digital animation which seem peculiarly out of place in Raimi’s otherwise relentlessly physical universe.

Also troubling is Spiderman’s growing habit of running around with his mask off (as opposed to `out of uniform’), most notably in a show-stopping sequence in which he goes head-to-head with an El-train in an altogether unbecoming state of facial undress. This is an age-old problem for big-screen comic-book adaptations, which need to flaunt their movie-star faces. Personally, I prefer my superheroes to remain sans visage whenever they’re on duty. Other than that, there’s little to quibble about and oodles more to enjoy in this twisted `mainstream’ adventure from a resolutely unruly talent.

Sam Raimi remains a horror geek at heart, proving once again that, in the world of big-screen fantasy, today’s menace to society is tomorrow’s saviour of cinema.

— The Guardian

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