Spider-Man led the way for other comic-book heroes

The run of comic book heroes on the big screen began with Spider-Man in 2002.

The 2002 film Spider-Man starring Tobey Maguire is on 7Mate, Sunday, 6.30pm.

Let us return now to the olden days of 2002, when computer-generated special effects were still relatively novel and nary a superhero could be found at the local multiplex.

Into this terrifying and now unthinkable void swung the old web-slinger himself, Marvel Comics’ Spider-Man (Sunday, 6.30pm, 7Mate).

Director Sam Raimi, a fan himself, cast the spot-on Tobey Maguire as poor, put-upon Peter Parker, and JK Simmons (Whiplash) as Parker’s editor J. Jonah Jameson, is also inspired.

The movie itself is a little cumbersome, but its triumphant arrival marked the first shot in a war of raging fandom that as yet has no end in sight. Bottom line, comic fans of a certain age never thought they’d live long enough to see the Spider-Man of their overactive adolescent imaginations. Then they did. Scarcely two years later, propelled by the success of the first film, Raimi and co were back with the even better Spider-Man 2 (Sunday, 9pm, 7Mate).

Cast and crew were now in a groove, with the borderline great script by Oscar-winning veteran Alvin Sargent (Julia, Ordinary People) showing a complex emotional maturity the genre’s largely left behind in subsequent tentpoles.

Alfred Molina’s cheerfully malevolent Doctor Octopus is one of the better-realised Marvel villains to date.

Contemporary Australian cinema has a clear penchant for the transgressive, an often controversial inclination that goes some way towards explaining the success of director Geoffrey Wright’s seminal 1992 drama Romper Stomper (Monday, 8.30pm, SBS2) and filmmaker Gregor Jordan’s smash-hit 1999 dark comedy crime thriller Two Hands (Saturday, 10.30pm, 7Mate). Both men wrote their films as well, which gives them an added unity of character and style that helps sell their concepts. In the former, a younger and leaner Russell Crowe brings a fierce urgency to skinhead gang leader Hando, while in the latter Bryan Brown shows off his comic chops as the cold-blooded yet oddly family-oriented crime lord … wait for it … Pando (coincidence? Hopefully). Two Hands was also the film that made stars of Rose Byrne and Heath Ledger.

A more traditional treatment of around-the-law film noir tropes may be discovered in director Irving Reis’s vigorous 1946 thriller Crack-Up (Monday, 2am, ABC). Hugh O’Brien plays an art critic and forgery expert who becomes enmeshed in a series of ruses and double-crosses that doubtless had the film’s trio of screenwriters working overtime to flesh out the short story on which it is based. Claire Trevor is the love interest, though the real star of the picture is the chiaroscuro lighting and no-nonsense camerawork of prolific cinematographer Robert De Grasse.

Two Hands (AV 15+) 4 stars

Saturday, 10.30pm, 7Mate (NSW, QLD only; WA, 10.55pm)

Spider-Man 2 (M) 4 stars

Sunday, 9pm, 7Mate

Crack-Up (PG) 3 stars

Monday, 2am, ABC