In the end, it’s all about frustration. No matter how much he tries, Spider-Man can’t please the city that benefits from his heroics, the people closest to him, or himself. So it is with Spider-Man the movie, which struggles mightily and succeeds often yet is doomed to disappoint the fanboys who’ve waited 40 years, general-interest newbies looking for the usual summer action spectacle, and maybe even Columbia Pictures, which ponied up big bucks to build a popcorn franchise and ended up with a glum opera of pop existentialism.
The genius of the Spider-Man comics has always been that their hero, like all the Marvel Comics characters created in his wake, is still just an ordinary guy with real-life problems and neuroses. Over at DC Comics, Superman doesn’t suffer from self-doubt, and Batman never has money woes, but poor Peter Parker has those problems and others that his spider powers not only fail to alleviate but often make worse. He’s a superhero whose saga is not an adolescent power fantasy but an adolescent angst trip.
So Tobey Maguire turns out to have been an inspired casting choice. Given his past roles (The Ice Storm, The Cider House Rules), he’s an old hand at geeky teenage awkwardness. Bitten by a mutant spider in a science lab, his Peter wakes up the next day to find his body has gone through a parody of puberty. His muscles fill out, little hairs sprout all over his body (that’s how he clings to walls), and a sticky white goo shoots out of his body and splatters all over the place, at least until he develops some wrist control. (This is his webbing, which, in a felicitous change from the comics, spews organically from his forearms instead of being a synthetic creation that dispenses from a wrist-mounted reservoir Peter has invented.)
Once he masters his new attributes, Peter becomes a web-swinging hero out of guilt; an early failure to use his power to stop a robber comes back to haunt him when the thug strikes again closer to home. But even using his power for good brings him no satisfaction. It makes him a totemic target for tabloid publisher J. Jonah Jameson (a scene-stealing J.K. Simmons), and a literal target for supervillain the Green Goblin, who also goes after Peter’s loved ones — Aunt May (Rosemary Harris), who’s raised him as a son, and unrequited crush Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst), whose growing attraction to both Peter and Spider-Man puts her at constant risk.
Not that using his power for evil is an option, though it’s one the Goblin offers him. Gobbo, it turns out, is Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe), a wealthy defense contractor and father of Peter’s pal Harry (James Franco). Like Peter, Norman is a science whiz and the subject of a lab accident, but his transformation is a horrifying travesty of Peter’s, driving him mad and creating a split personality. He provides a cautionary example of the road Spider-Man might have taken, but to fight him is to risk hurting still more of the people closest to Peter.
The movie is best during its first half, which breathes fresh life into the myth of origin that will be familiar to Spider fans but also offers what even non-fans will find a resonant coming-of-age story. The second half, with its big battle scenes, is probably more of what the studio wanted, but it’s far less satisfying. There’s a lot of unconvincing CGI, some outrageous scenery chewing by Dafoe, and some oddly draggy, stop-start pacing from director Sam Raimi, who’s usually a master of forward momentum, whether headlong (the Evil Dead trilogy) or deliberate (A Simple Plan, The Gift). There’s also some spectacularly bad dialogue (the screenplay is credited to David Koepp but was the product of several writers’ pens) whenever Peter/Spider-Man has a heart-to-heart with Mary Jane, and that stops the movie dead.
Even when he fights, Spider-Man has nothing memorable to say — a change from the comics, where he was cracking witticisms and skulls at the same time decades before Schwarzenegger, and with more panache. On the page, the costume frees Peter to be the brash, cool, carefree, popular teen he longs to be the rest of the time, but Maguire’s Spider-Man is just Parker in spandex. The movie artfully nails the comics’ take on adolescent helplessness, but its sense of comic-book fun is in too short supply.
