Word: comicality
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...Plausibility isn't the biggest challenge for the comic-book-movie fan base. Sentimentality is. An Ain't It Cool News review, supposedly written by the mother of a friend of AICN critic Moriarty, tosses Spidey 3 into the sar-chasm by informing us that "There's only about 25 minutes of actual Spidey footage in this movie - which makes all kinds of room for: That darling Mary Jane singing (two songs!). Peter Parker crying. Harry [Osborn] crying.... The Sandman crying. Eddie Brock crying. Mary Jane crying. Aunt May crying.... And yes, I might as well tell you, there...
...Which could be why I liked it. To place a sensitive story in a male-epic genre - to dramatize feelings of angst and personal betrayal worthy of an Ingmar Bergman film, and then to dress them up in gaudy comic-book colors - is to pull off a smartly subversive drag show. With, yes, 25 mins. of fabulous fights. Peter's tussle with Sandman, and his aerial battle with the supersonic skateboarding New Goblin, are plenty snazzy. But anyone can do that; in action movies, everyone has done that. What's better, in a threequel, is rethinking the characters, the franchise...
...Spider, Flint-Sandman and Harry-Goblin - seeking to purge their inner demons, receive absolution for their sins. In this very serious movie, only Grace and Raimi regular Bruce Campbell, in a nice cameo as a varry Franch maitre d', seem to be having the outsize fun normally associated with comic-book capers...
...Usually sequels get made because we liked their stars the first time around. In the first Spider-Man movie, Tobey Maguire had just the right degree of dorkiness to be relatable for comic book fans and lovable for the rest of us. In the first Pirates movie, Johnny Depp's sexually ambiguous, Keith Richards-inspired Captain Jack Sparrow became a new comic icon. Aware of their worth to their franchises, Maguire and Depp demand bigger fees to stick around. It?s a safe bet that the $17 million Maguire got for Spider-Man 2 is at the very least matched...
...sometimes falls flat—instead of striking dread into our hearts, you kind of smile at his goofiness. There will also, no doubt, be dissent in the details. Diehard fans will feel bittersweet toward the film; the sequence of events is vastly different that that of the comics. For example, Gwen Stacy was Parker’s first true love, killed at the hand of the original Green Goblin. There are also some atrocious one liners: “I protected you in high school, but now I’m gonna kick your little ass?...