Pulp Fiction

WEBBUS INTERRUPTUS: Spider-Man (Tobey Maguire) shoots blanks.

With Spider-Man 2, the comic-book movie grows up.

Spider-Man 2

by Sam Adams

"Where've you gone to, Spider-Man?" asks a plaintive street musician in Sam Raimi's blockbuster sequel, a question that action buffs may themselves feel prompted to ask. In interviews, Raimi chalked up the first movie's record-breaking success to audiences' liking for Spidey's nerdy, fumble-tongued alter ego Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire), and Spider-Man 2 proceeds from the premise that Spider-Man is more interesting out of costume than in. It's a movie about Peter Parker, with some Spider-Man thrown in.

Spider-Man may fight crime by cocooning criminals rather than cleaning their clocks, but he's still a vigilante, if a vigilante of an era where turning crooks over to the cops offered some assurance that justice would be done. And like any comic-book vigilante movie, the first Spider-Man turned on issues that were essentially adolescent: loneliness, alienation, impatience with authority. Hollywood movies, even those with adult (or at least grownup) characters, so frequently pander to adolescent minds (and allowances) that the first movie's Peter never registered as a bona fide teen; after all, his emotional maturity was at least equal to Batman's. But Spider-Man 2, whose writers include Alvin Sargent (Ordinary People) and novelist Michael Chabon, takes the genre past puberty, perhaps for the first time. If it can't properly be called "mature" — and let's face it, no one wants to know how Superman pays his mortgage — it's at least young adult.

Two years after the first movie, both on- and off-screen, Peter's a college sophomore, trying to balance his crime-fighting career, his physics homework and his still-unconsummated crush on Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst). Though Peter has the power to swing from buildings, shoot webs from his wrists and wear skintight clothes, he's still, in many respects, an ordinary 20-year-old. Raimi lays the Parker-the-schmuck routine on too thick — getting his schoolbooks stomped on once would have been sufficient — but we get the point: being a superhero isn't all it's cracked up to be. With great power come great scheduling conflicts.

It doesn't help that there's a new fly in Spider-Man's ointment: one Dr. Octopus (Alfred Molina), a kindly scientist whose failed attempt at fusion takes his wife's life and gives him four mechanical arms with a malevolent mind of their own. (The talented Molina is used to much better effect in Coffee and Cigarettes, though the scenes where he "argues" with his robotic limbs are an unexpected treat.) But Dr. O's nefarious schemes don't do much to divert the plot. The movie's central question — can Peter Parker be Spider-Man and still have, you know, a life? — would come to a head without Doc Ock's help. He just gets it done in under two hours.

Freed of the pressure to produce his first big hit, Raimi plays fast and loose with Spider-Man's pulp origins. It's not just a matter of playing to the movie's funnybook fanbase — though the look on Peter's face when he finds out Aunt May's thrown out his old comics is no doubt one Raimi can call up from memory — but tweaking its essential silliness as well. The offices of The Daily Planet, home to J.K. Simmons' magnificent J. Jonah Jameson, play home to most of the movie's in-jokes, spat out at Hudsucker Proxy speed. "Guy named Otto Octavius ends up with eight limbs," Jameson barks. "What are the odds of that?" Eight to one, maybe?

Spider-Man may be invincible, but Peter Parker's having growing pains. It's not just that Mary Jane is getting tired of waiting around for a man who can't be on time for anything, settling for a reliable squarehead (who just happens to be Jameson's son) instead. At first, Raimi's reliance on nubile young women for the inevitable shots of citizens gazing upward at Spider-Man's exploits seem to be garden-variety Hollywood sexism (and I'm not saying they aren't), but when Raimi pulls the same trick as Peter hurries down the street on his way to class, you realize he's also showing you that women are starting to notice Peter Parker, in and out of costume. Fighting supervillains is all well and good, but it won't keep you warm at night.

When Spider-Man's powers first start to fail him, you suspect some secondary villain, or a hitherto untipped Octo-plot, but it turns out to be simple performance anxiety. (It doesn't take a semiotician to unpack the metaphor when Spidey's webbing fails to shoot from his wrists.) As Peter starts to realize, Spider-Man and Peter Parker aren't two different people: He can no more give up one identity than the other. There's more here than the call of duty, the "great responsibility" that Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson) is exhumed to remind us of once more. When the movie's protagonist turns up, as he often does in its final reels, wearing his costume but not his mask, a new character is effectively created, and a new subgenre along with it. Like Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' comic-book series Watchmen, Spider-Man 2 sees past the adolescent identity crisis to a merger of disparate identities: not how do you hide who you are, but how do you live with it? Though it delivers the requisite quota of summer-movie bangs and clanks (the digital Spidey looks as fake as ever), Spider-Man 2 is thus a chimerical beast, sneaking real emotions in the back as the explosions roar.

Spider-Man 2 Directed by Sam Raimi A Sony Pictures release Now playing at area theaters

recommended