By The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to Sam Raimi’s box-office-conquering, franchise-starting 2002 superhero classic Spider-Man, starring Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, Willem Dafoe and James Franco.
Oh, for Stan Lee’s sake, another week, and yes, another superhero movie! As if Supergirl wasn’t enough, there have also been all the latest Marvel Studios announcements (at last, Ryan Gosling joins The Marvel Universe as Ghost Rider…it’s a perfect match of crap!), along with the “trailer drop” for Avengers: Doomsday …and now comes Spider-Man: Brand New Day! More fake-humble Tom Holland nonsense, with The Hulk and The Punishment thrown in for good measure! God, make it stop!
Haven’t we had enough? What’s it gonna be next? That wimp from Twilight in The Batman 2, the next in the pretentious series that desperately and painfully attempts to inject grit, intensity and danger into the story of a nut-job who dresses up as a bat and hangs around in dark alleys in the middle of the night “looking for trouble?” Mmmm, maybe he’s actually looking for something else!
With all of this superhero nonsense (my skin crawls just with the thought of the day Avengers: Doomsday hits cinemas), one thing is abundantly clear: the media is obviously run by pathetic man-children who won’t give up their pre-adolescent dreams that a “man really can fly.” If it wasn’t so funny, it would actually be a bit sad.
Which brings us to 2002’s Spider-Man (and its two equally crap sequels), the film series partially responsible for today’s over-abundance of superhero flicks. Geez, this was a series so “good” that it apparently needed to be “rebooted” a mere six years after the studio had sensibly pulled the plug on it…and then got rebooted again three years after that!
Directed by that hack, Sam Raimi (who got his rocks off by having a chick raped by a tree in The Evil Dead…yeah, nice one), 2002’s Spider-Man plays out like a shitty, super-powered episode of Beverly Hills 90210, as Tobey Maguire (a true wet lettuce of the first order…Paul Dano has nothing on this bloke) mopes around and gets all angst-ridden over the “responsibility” of being a superhero after he’s been bitten by a radioactive spider. Yeah, whatever.
And then there’s Willem Dafoe (ham-bone alert!) as The Green Goblin, a cackling imbecile of a villain who looks like a Mighty Morphin Power Ranger and tools around on an aerial skateboard. People think this is quality cinema? Puh-lease! It made money, the critics loved it, and the fan-boys-and-girls blew their respective loads, but Spider-Man is just a sticky case of cinematic arrested development. Grow up, everyone! Now, where’s that big rolled up newspaper that we had lying around…splat!
