Darker webs: "Spider-Man 2"

From Where We Are Now, it may be close to impossible to conceive this. Yet once 2002's Spider-Man proved a hit - and only once it proved a hit - a sequel was commissioned; and once the original screenwriter David Koepp passed, because he had a promising directorial career of his own to get on with, Sony turned to the septuagenarian scribe Alvin Sargent, a two-time Oscar winner for such grown-up ventures as 1977's Julia and 1980's Ordinary People. This was the first sign of renewed ambition on Spider-Man 2's part: it would be a sequel that definitively moved things along, acknowledging its characters had learnt from the events of the first film, even as they became young adults in their own right. Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) is now a delivery boy and struggling student, his beloved Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) a model and actress (this being the noblest goal Hollywood could wish for a heroine in 2004), Harry Osborn (James Franco) a suit assuming control of his late father's company. First things first: it wasn't just more of the same. (One frustration with the subsequent reboots was that a gamer experiences after their avatar perishes or their console glitches out, forcing them to go through the early levels all over again.) Film two's theme is growing pains, whether the perils of not getting what you want (PP/MJ) or getting what you don't want (the notoriety that became an even bigger problem in later films), a sense your body is failing on you (as with Parker's suddenly sketchy webshooters, almost certainly a greater concern to middle-aged creatives than thrusting teenage onlookers), the troubles that follow from finding out your heroes (here, Alfred Molina's Otto Octavius) aren't all you believed them to be. It's all more complicated now, and only occasionally does Spider-Man 2 regather the boyish pep that sustained early runs of the comic and Sam Raimi's original film: you catch a glimpse of it when Parker tells the young kids stunned by his backflip over a speeding vehicle that such feats are possible if they, too, would only eat their greens.

If that sounds earnest, well, that's what differentiates a Kennedy-era creation like Spider-Man from, say, the fundamentally postmodern Deadpool, and it never quite clots or gets cloying. The sequel is energised by Raimi's gift for storyboarding - and finding the images that, while locating an evocative, even stirring halfway house between the comic book and the cinema, keep this story moving in the right direction. A woman sees her own terrified reflection in the shattered glass headed for her jugular; the Spidey-suit gets tossed in a trashcan, its mask sticking out just so; a series of juddering camera jolts - pneumatic push-ins just after a car gets tossed through a coffee shop window - mark the reemergence of Doc Ock come the final act. Right through to his dying moments, the villain remains a superlative visual gag, rising up from the operating table to do for the surgeons trying to separate him from his tech, and later conversing with these vicious metal claws, which breach the frame like minions looking for a command, or Emu for Parky. The PG rating is perhaps down to a prevailing geniality of spirit and tone, but the action is both more expansive and more intense second time around: Raimi segues breathlessly and seamlessly from a vertical stand-off (atop a clock tower) to a horizontal charge (on one of the city's elevated trains) which forcibly unmasks our hero and converts him, at a considerable rate of knots, into a secular Christ figure suffering for New York's innumerable sins. Sargent and Raimi are united in their desire to build character, rather than merely worlds, and also to do it with a few deft strokes of the penhand, rather than the circumlocution-slash-twaddle that has passed for backstory in subsequent Marvel movies.

You can tell Raimi and casting director Dianne Crittenden were on something like the right, characterful lines from the number of pre-famous faces spotted in supporting roles: Octavia Spencer and Elizabeth Banks in film one, Banks and Joel McHale here. Up top, state-of-the-art visual effects are welded to rigorously steered performance: Molina suggests a man literally deformed by grief even before the computers kick in, and reminded me I could barely recall the villains in the Garfield/Holland Spider-Men. If I was slightly less wowed by Spider-Man 2 this time out, I suspect a) that's partly how these movies operate (they're built above all else for opening weekend), and b) it struck me that some of the issues that would sink 2007's overstuffed Spider-Man 3 were lying dormant here. Sargent's script is a well-organised patchwork, but it's a patchwork nevertheless: too many villains (Doc Ock, Franco's Harry, Dylan Baker lurking as a professor set up to be something he's not), too many love interests, and a thick strain of self-analysis that leaves Parker an at best reluctant hero for the bulk of the running time. These franchises are like Doc Ock's magnetising machine; they draw everything in, burn it all up, and threaten to bury human interest. In retrospect, the sequel looks less like a pinnacle than a clearly identifiable tipping point, which is harder to cheer than the giddying highs of the first film. The complication of Peter Parker runs in parallel with the complication of the Spider-Man franchise, and the complication of superhero movies - the more issues they take on, the further away they carry us from zippy good-versus-evil fun - is their downfall. These things need to be light, so they fly, but not so weightless they make the popcorn feel like a filling meal. For a film and three-quarters, Raimi got the balance right, which is an achievement - but there would be bigger challenges ahead, with far less satisfying outcomes.

Spider-Man 2 is now playing in cinemas nationwide.