If you’ve ever felt like like the world was dumping on you, all you have to do is remember Puny Parker, and the world won’t seem so bad! Spiderman 2 just might be the best comic book you’ll ever watch. It’s just that good. This film is crammed with so much raw character development, it’s incredible that they had any room for a heart-stopping action adventure.

I could only come up with a few minor points that initially bothered me as going against the long comic history of ol’ web head, but now they seem like real innovations. Both points are a little spoliery, so don’t read on if you’re the one who hasn’t seen the movie… and shame on you!

Those annoying and/or brilliant points? For one, the suddenly wobbly nature Peter’s arachnid abilities still seems a tiny bit hokey, but I can forgive it as a larger-than-life reflection of his emotional rejection of his web-slinging duties. Secondly, Spidey goes thru a lot of this movie topless, so to speak. I’m sure this was done in large part to help Toby do his acting thing, but it’s heretical! But again, I’ll forgive it because even comic book rules are made to be broken, and whenever it happened, it just plain worked.

So, if you can’t quite piece it together from all this drooling, Spiderman 2 is a fairly perfect two hours of escapist, yet grounded fantasy euphoria.