"Spider-Man 2"

With their mixture of the organic and the mechanical, those arms would have been catnip for David Lynch or Guillermo del Toro (whose "Hellboy" has all the grandeur, poetry and romance missing from "Spider-Man 2") or perhaps even David Cronenberg (if he had a sense of humor). But after he's established as a character, Doc Ock is pretty much absent until the last half-hour, when the filmmakers seem to suddenly remember they need a villain and bring him back.

There's a good moment when a group of New Yorkers try to protect Spider-Man by telling Doc Ock he's going to have to go through them first. He uses his mechanical arms to shove them out of his way. Couldn't he have done away with even one innocent bystander to give the movie a jolt? This is an adventure without cunning or bloodlust, a fairy tale without any of the lyrical cruelty that gives fairy tales their primal power. Even when Doc Ock unleashes those fiendish arms in an operating room on a surgical team trying to remove them, there isn't a drop of blood to be seen.

The screenwriter, Alvin Sargent, wrote the scripts for "Ordinary People" and "Julia." That's blame enough for one lifetime, but Sargent can't get off scot-free here. "Spider-Man 2" is packed with incidents, but it's a pileup rather than a plot. The script, from a story by Michael Chabon and the team of Alfred Gough and Miles Milar, is supposed to be about how Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) learns to live with the burden of being Spider-Man -- that is, how a young man learns that adult life means compromise. It plays less like the education of a hero than like the tale of a young man so self-absorbed you have a hard time believing there's anything heroic in him.

"Spider-Man 2" picks up two years after the first movie ends. Peter is struggling to balance his duties as Spider-Man and his life as a college student, and failing miserably. Scraping by on next to no money, he has a shabby one-room apartment (the landlord who's always dunning him for back rent is played by the wonderful Elya Baskin, whose bulging eyes and rough manner suggest what Charlie Chaplin's nemesis Eric Campbell might have done had he spoken onscreen). He's given up pursuit of the girl he loves, Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst), because he fears his identity as Spider-Man will endanger her. Peter's best friend, Harry (James Franco), who blames Spider-Man for the death of his father (the first movie's villain, the Green Goblin), resents what he believes is Peter's friendship with Spidey. And Peter's dear old Aunt May (Rosemary Harris) is about to be tossed out of her Queens home because she can't pay the mortgage.

Some of the details in that buttload of misery don't add up. I understand that college is the time to cut the apron strings, but I couldn't figure out why Peter gives up his room in Aunt May's house for a rat hole in the city -- especially when his contribution could help her pay the mortgage. (Harris is stuck with the movie's worst lines, but she has one good moment when she lashes out in anger at Peter for trying to refuse the 20 bucks she hands him for his birthday; you feel her resentment at being an old woman in straitened circumstances.) When we find out that M.J. is engaged to the son of Spidey's nemesis, newspaper editor J. Jonah Jameson, is it just laziness that keeps Sargent from including a scene between M.J. and her prospective father-in-law? (Once again, J.K. Simmons is so much like what you expect Jonah Jameson to be from the comic book that he gets a laugh nearly every time he opens his mouth.) And when we find out the reason Peter's web-slinging powers are so erratic, it's a cheat.

Next page: Spidey? Letting some poor guy get mugged?