With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

When they announced Marc Webb would direct the next Spider-Man I thought to myself, wait the dude from (500) Days of Summer? Yeah it was a good movie but I have no interest in seeing Spidy in a dance sequence to a Hall and Oates song. Seriously, why are we getting a reboot ten years after the last one when a fourth Sam Raimi would have been much better? What makes it worse is that a proposed fourth Raimi movie would have featured John Malkovich as Vulture in perfect type casting and Anne Hathaway as Felicia Handy, aka Black Cat (who ironically went on to playing a female cat person in another comic book movie). And since Webb cast Emma Stone in his movie I am going to have to begrudgingly rent it in a couple months.

Aside from a massive upgrade at love interest, I just cannot see the new version begging better than the Sam Rami version which is this month’s induction into the Scooter Hall of Fame. After the campiness of the later nineties Batman films almost killed off the superhero movies, they came back in a massive way in the early 00’s thanks to films like X-Men and Spider-Man who brought some seriousness back to the funny books and Sam Raimi’s love and respect for the story is shown throughout.

As cool as Spider-Man’s web slinging is, let’s face it, a superhero is only as good as his rouge’s gallery and Spidy’s is second only to Batman’s. And while some of my favorites were held back for future movies (Doc Ock, Sandman) , the Green Goblin was a worthy first opponent thanks to a stellar performance from Willem Defoe (even if he looked scarier with the mask off). And like any great nemesis, Green Goblin was a close relationship to Spider-Man as the father of Peter Packer’s best friend. J.K. Simmons also gave a great performance as Peter’s boss J. Jonah Jameson. And of course what Same Raimi film would be complete without a cameo from Bruce Campbell (who played three different roles in the three movies). Spider-Man is also notable for have one of the very few video game that not only did not suck massive but it was a really great game and even features Bruce Campbell as the Narrator all three game tie-ins.