TheRetroCritic

I review the first three Spider-Man movies. Part 2 coming soon...

Sam Raimi's Spider-Man films never aspired to any gritty realism or a dark, brooding tone. They were bright, colourful, cartoony, gloriously silly comic-book flicks with the principal goal of just being loads of fun. And no matter how dumb the films got, they were always entertaining. So after Spider-Man 3 , the franchise's jump-the-shark moment, and before the eventual reboot I thought I should check out the best film of the trilogy to see if it still holds up. And you know what? It really does. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's not flawless: you do get some very goofy moments here and there and the film could have been trimmed a tiny bit but, on the whole, this is one surprisingly solid Spidey movie which fixes most of the first film's shortcomings and is all the better for it. For one thing, you've got a good villain in Alfred Molina's Doc Ock. With the Green Goblin's tight rubber suit far from sight, Molina makes Dr Octavius appropriately geeky