Spider-Man
Directed by Sam Raimi
Written by David Koepp
Staring Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst and Willem Dafoe
Classification: PG
Rating: ***
The big-screen arrival of the 40-year-old Marvel Comic hero Spider-Man, brings pleasure back to New York's skyscrapers, as the webbed acrobat turns a stylized Manhattan into a supersized jungle gym, swinging and twirling through the high-rise alleys. The movie's final image, as the red and blue figure spins on twin strands between buildings high above the street, is not so much a memorable movie ending, but the launch of a new New York movie franchise.
Though Spider-Man comes with a huge budget, in excess of $130-million (U.S.), the money is spent on taking viewers into its world more than blowing them away. Director Sam Raimi ( The Evil Dead, A Simple Plan) is not aiming to out-flash Richard Donner's myth-laden Superman movie, or to out-art design Tim Burton's expressionist Batman, but to create the warmth of a reel-to-reel comic book. The result has its pluses and minuses.
The action swings between the comic's more intimate frames and radical geometric perspectives, but to its credit focuses mainly on the warm-hearted human tale of the innocent superhero in a hard world, rather than on visual dazzle. On the downside, the inevitable climactic standoffs between comic-book hero and villain feel more like a matter of formulaic necessity than imaginative inspiration.
David Koepp's screenplay (based on Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's Marvel Comic series) moves surely and briskly through the movie's first half to weave the improbable into a backdrop of the plausible. The time frame is nebulous. Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) is an aspiring photographer who works for tabloid-newspaper editor Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons). The editor is straight out of a 1940s screwball comedy, yet talks about "Julia Roberts in a thong." Similarly, this is an era when the New York borough of Queens represents small-town values, yet corporate genetic-engineering experiments are threatening the safety of the human race.
The first hour is a sweet and playful series of discoveries, and it utterly validates the casting of the gently spacey Tobey Maguire ( The Wonder Boys, The Cider House Rules) in the pivotal role. He's a specialist in lonely characters with troubled secret lives.
Parker is an orphan who lives with his kindly, working-class uncle, Ben (Cliff Robertson), and Aunt May (Rosemary Harris). Parker carries a torch for his next-door neighbour, the red-haired Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst), a popular girl with a dark secret -- an abusive father.
For reasons that are flimsy -- beyond his ingratiatingly nervous smile, thick glasses and intellectual superiority -- Peter is such a reject at school that even the other rejects avoid him. Then comes the class field trip, when a genetically altered spider happens to drop on his arm and bite him. Parker goes home feeling ill, and wakes the next morning with magically improved vision, a buff body and a whole new set of skills, all of which instantly delight rather than terrify him.
Maguire is best at these moments of physical play, as the bashful hero practises his web-throwing techniques, discovers he can climb walls with his sticky fingers and make a fool of the school bully with his arachnoid athleticism.
When he still can't impress M.J., he decides to enter a wrestling contest to earn money for a used car. There's an almost too brief comic display of his prowess (in a comically baggy proto-Spider-Man costume that looks like tie-dyed pajamas) in a caged battle against a goliath. High on his new strength, and M.J's increasing interest, Peter's skyscraper swinging is the flight of a boy in love. When he comes crashing down -- to discover that he's partly responsible for letting his uncle be fatally wounded -- Spider-Kid turns into Spider-Man.
Meanwhile, the melodramatic wheels start to grind, bringing the movie down to a more ordinary comic-book formula through its final two acts. Peter's best friend in school is Harry (James Franco), son of scientist and multimillionaire Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe). Osborn Sr. is kindly disposed to the bright young Parker, but his affable front hides a rapacious ambition. Desperate to win a major government contract, he is engaging in some genetic experiments. Ignoring an assistant who warns that "aggression, violence and insanity" are possible side effects of his new human-enhancement potion, Osborn downs a dose.
Dafoe makes for a dandy, leering gentleman, adding more than a hint of vampire campiness to his aristocratic villain. After drinking the potion, he's apparently possessed by a demonic alter-ego (dubbed "Green Goblin" by Peter's newspaper boss), who wears green armour, spins around Manhattan on a jerky, flying skateboard and tosses exploding mechanical pumpkins at his enemies. Instead of ravishing mid-air battle scenes, audiences get a villain zooming around rooftops like a hopped-up watering can. At that point, Spider-Man looks like just another expensive superhero movie.
Much better are scenes where the action comes down to city streets where M.J., now slinging food in a greasy spoon while striving to be an actress, finds herself in the cruel, randomly violent world of New York. Each time disaster seems near, her superhero stalker drops in, throws some webbing around and makes things right.
Though not able to deliver stock lines with the freshness Maguire can muster, Dunst serves as an interesting contrast -- brittle and direct compared to Maguire's dreamy diffusiveness.
Naturally, she's the sexual aggressor here (because all superheroes are chaste) and there's a particular upside-down, half-masked kiss that instantly becomes one of movie history's more memorable smooches. It's the kiss to send any teenaged boy on a spinning high, as well as launching the new age of arachnophilia.
Liam Lacey