Review By John Barker:
- Better than a cheese royale: buy one while its hot

"With great power, comes great responsibility." Is the motto which drives every vein of Spiderman’s existence and the same dogma can be applied to Sam Raimi, The Evil Dead director, entrusted to direct a sequel to his own original blockbuster.

The second installment of this popularized comic sees the director inject a lot more of his personal visual style into the comic mix. The opening title sequence is a perfect example of Raimi imprinting himself upon the comic work of Steve Dikco and Stan Lee (who makes a cameo performance) as the whole Spider-story of the first film is conveyed through some abstractly inked comic frames.

There is also a noticeable difference in the character of Peter Parker, who this time round uses his superpowers for more mundane tasks including pizza delivery. In fact, even his superpowers can’t save his job at the fast-food restaurant and this failure and heartache perpetuates as Raimi’s narcissism predominates. Tobey Maguire’s Parker is tormented by people banging into him at college, and being told off by his teacher before returning home to face the guilt of his Uncle’s death, which he has yet to confess to his beloved Aunt May.

Life doesn’t get any better for Parker as he is behind in his rent and even the love of his life, Mary Jane Watson or MJ, rejects him in favor of heroic astronaut John Jameson - son of Daily Bugle editor J. Jonah Jameson.

As if this wasn’t enough to send Spidey running for the insecticide, the media are also persecuting him with editor Jameson leading his one man campaign to demonize the masked vigilante. The viewer can not help but notice that this looming isolation draws a direct parallel with Tony Blair’s battle against various tabloid and broadsheet publications recently, but I am still left with little empathy for either Spiderman’s or the British Prime Minister’s situation.

Of course, all of this psychological pain and suffering manifests itself physically for our superhero, who suffers from insect-impotency as his web-fluid dries up. These are all normal problems from a young-man still discovering his sexuality, which is an integral part of the Spiderman myth.

The first film showed Parker developing his masculinity through pseudo-masturbatory ejaculations of web-fluid, as he learned to control his powers. Contrastingly, the second outing conveys a metaphorical castration; after being rejected by Mary Jane and losing his superpowers, Parker drags his broken motorbike through a backstreet covered in posters featuring MJ - like a man dragging his flaccid, impotent penis past his last great sexual encounter.

However, flaccidity is not something that Dr. Octo Octavious (Alfred Molina) suffers from, as not content with having four limbs, another four artificial limbs are added, hence his name. The terrible tentacles are fused to his body during an experiment involving a new form of renewable energy, which he foolishly believes he can control. Molina’s portrayal of the tragic villain is more balanced than William Defoe’s Green Goblin from the first film - who makes a small cameo in the conclusion of the film.

In fact, one of the visual highlights of the film appears in the sequence where Dr. Ock, as the press name him, escapes from the surgeons’ knife. After destroying the medical team with his mechanical arms, the audience are privileged to a subjective point-of-view from one of the tentacles. A cunning visual reference to Raimi’s earlier work, but the fun doesn’t end here for Raimi as one of the surgeons hacks at a tentacle with a chainsaw, bringing back memories of Bruce Cambells’ zombie-slaying in The Evil Dead films.

Spiderman would probably welcome facing off against the undead given the soap-opera nihilism of the script for this second outing. Not content with alienation from work, love and family, Peter Parker also loses his best friend Harry Osbourne and as the song goes ‘Things Can Only Get Better’.

However, Parker must lose his superhero alter-ego before things start to look up. He dumps his spandex suit in a trashcan in a moodily lit scene taken from the pages of The Amazing Spider-Man 50# , which will keep the comic book fanatics in check. This cathartic action leads Parker to confess his responsibility for the death of Uncle Ben to his teary-eyed Aunt, forming the most ripened scene of maturity in the film as Raimi simply holds the camera on Maguire and allows him to act.

Other interesting asides in the film come from Raimi’s playful nature, as he shows MJ developing a fetish for upside down kissing with her new boyfriend and willfully enjoys debugging the myth of the invincible American alpha-male.

The adventures of Spiderman will continue beyond the second sequel that has already been pledged and the hope is that the chic and tone of series will continue. The style of this sequel is on the whole more baroque and while no better than the first film, it still provides an enjoyable night of arachnotainment.