As the challenge continues, we get to touch on some of the ancillary aspects of comic books. One of the first questions that comes up is what one thinks is the most overrated comic book movie. Now, there are plenty of bad comic book movies out there to be sure, but overrated is a different story. The Dark Knight Rises gets a lot of praise critically, but it doesn’t generate a lot of buzz from fans overall, especially compared to The Dark Knight. You can take down pretty much any of the Marvel movies for any reason, and certainly The Avengers can earn it just because of the effusive praise of fans alone, but it backs it up in a lot of ways with what it does in bringing together so many different things over the years to the first major team-up movie.
So what do I come back to but the one movie that I think is just given far more credit than it’s due with Spider-Man 2 from 2004.
The film, directed by Sam Raimi and starring Tobey Maguire in the lead role is one that certainly frustrates me in a lot of ways. It certainly was a very good comic book movie for the time, but it’s also filled with flaws that stand out more as time goes on – but is still heralded as the best of the Spider-Man movies, especially when trying to talk down the two relaunched films. And I still find the first one of those, Amazing Spider-Man, to be the best of the five films made
This film has some good things going for it with the overall story, Alfred Molina as Doc Ock and some good romance moments that make me like it a bit more than I should, particularly with my own affection towards Kirsten Dunst. But this trilogy of films felt like it never found the right tone for the character. The banter from Maguire was minimal at best and didn’t reflect the two sides of the personality with the costume. It lacked a certain sense of fun about it that it really needed to have since that long defined the main character of it. Raimi handles things well with the direction and it keeps it moving, but there’s so many of the usual tropes here that you end up bogged down in it. I’m not looking for innovation, though the film was the strongest entry at the time for showing us some real web slinging, but the main problem that I continually come away from with it is that Maguire just didn’t embody Parker in a good way and certainly didn’t embody Spider-Man when he put on the suit. And that made it hard to get into, which made it easier to skip the third film.
