Lucky for the film viewing public, this second installment of the Spider-Man franchise takes everything right with the first movie and improves upon it. The first Spider-Man was a great movie – a competent and exciting film, deftly directed and finely acted for a superhero movie. But it almost seemed like it wasn’t big enough.

Even though the film has some serious caliber acting talent (I’ll get to that in a second), the real star of the show is director Sam Raimi. We all know and love the man’s low budget movies, most especially Evil Dead. But with the first Spider-Man, he was forced or chose to tone down his signature style for a more straightforward blockbuster-action oriented approach. With Spider-Man 2, Raimi brings back his unabashedly frenetic style. In one tremendously exciting sequence, Doc Ock’s arms madly attack doctors in manner lifted directly out of Evil Dead 2. With no music in the background, we see huge optical zooms, blood and shaky-cam as the horror-hag screams of terror fly through the soundscape.