In my bedroom in Hampton, trapped inside a musty closet, there are over 600 comic books, all neatly bagged and boarded on the offchance that someday, somewhere, somehow, they may be worth something. Of all the superhero adventures I collected in my youth, I would have to rank my Spider-Man issues as the ones with the highest dollar value. And no wonder. Spider-Man has been around for decades, probably the most famous and most popular Marvel superhero of them all (just ask the other former members of that tacky Merry Marvel Marching Society -- where are you now, Namor?). So it was with great anticipation -- although having seen the trailers, I must confess they were low expectations -- that I went to see the live action version of the comic book.
For the kiddies who have no memory of Christopher Reeve lifting buses or Adam West punching villains as speech bubbles burst from the screen, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man must be sheer bliss. It moves at a brisk pace and, at the very least, it stays true to the origins of the character. From the memorable excerpt when the beloved Uncle Ben reminds us, "With great power comes great responsibility," to Peter Parker's brief stint as an amateur wrestler, it would appear the designers and writers have their ducks in a row.
The problem with this new summer blockbuster, however, is that the action scenes uniformly suck. The people certainly don't look like people and the superheroes don't look like superheroes bouncing around. Everything simply looks like computer graphics, sped up or slowed down in the hopes that people won't notice they're looking at something blatantly artificial. I think I'd prefer a comic book look than a video game. If this is the future of special effects, you can count me out.
The story is about Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire), an outcast with an enormous crush on the lovely Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst). Parker is of course bitten by a spider and finds himself able to climb buildings and spin webs from his wrists (this is a slight discrepancy from the comic book, which had him inventing the web-spinning technology himself). Meanwhile, tycoon Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe) is noticing changes of his own, as he converts into the maniacal Green Goblin.
What works best in the film is the chemistry between the mediocre Maguire and the radiant Dunst. Finally, Dunst becomes the Lois Lane, Vicki Vale, or Lana Lang we comic book fans have been waiting for (the truck-just-hit-me Margot Kidder, the skanky Kim Basinger or the gangly Annette O'Toole were certainly not dreamy by any stretch of the imagination). In fact, just the Peter Parker/MJ scenes would have made a better film on their own.
There are a lot of awkward sequences. In one scene, New Yorkers start throwing trash at the Green Goblin and it's kind of cheesy. Spider-Man's costume never really works; it seems artifically grafted to his body. The Green Goblin's mouth doesn't move (if you think about it, even in the tacky 60's cartoon at least they got that much right when they drew the character). Worst is the conclusion, which essentially goes against eons of genetic, hormonal tendencies in favour of some hypothetical need to protect the Greater Good.
Overall, there wasn't nearly enough comedy in the film. The best thing about Spider-Man is that he can be battling gruesome characters like Venom and Carnage and still crack one liners. The only real comic relief comes from Law & Order veteran J.K. Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson, but the part is so underwritten that it's easy to forget he was in the movie at all. Spider-Man has made oodles at the box office and I'm sure it will continue to do so. Given its phony look though, I have to wonder how much repeat business it truly deserves to generate.
