Decent movie, but marred by miscasting, creaky plotting, and bad CGI (meaning it's got the same flaws as a lot of summer blockbusters).

Rating: Null/10 (21 November 2003)

** 1/2 out of ****
Not too long ago, I was a rather avid fan of the Spider-Man comics, always anxiously awaiting each month to see what new catastrophe our webbed hero would have to face. I stopped keeping track of the stories after the "clone saga" mess, which is simply one of the worst cases of "overblown" I've ever read. Then I heard news about a Spider-Man movie, which quickly became reality. It was an event I was neither looking forward to nor dreading. Unsurprisingly, it's a movie that I felt neither unbridled enthusiasm for nor utter disdain. It's about as middling as a decent movie can be.
High school student Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) is a nerdy amateur photographer who's bitten by a radioactive spider, consquently being endowed with arachnid-like powers. He has super-strength, can jump great distances, and maybe best of all, he's got a spider-sense that warns him of danger. With these new abilities, his first acts are only thinking of himself, generally trying to make as much money as possible with his strength and agility.
But when Peter's uncle is killed by a robber, he realizes that "with great power comes great responsibility." Haunted by his uncle's death, he goes about as a crimefighter, dressed in a red and blue costume, calling himself Spider-Man. A new, even more powerful foe called the Green Goblin arrives on the NYC scene, causing a lot of destruction in hopes of...well, that's not really clear. Meanwhile, Peter has to balance out his crimefighting with his personal lives, particularly with Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst), a redhead he's got a crush on.
The very core of Spider-Man's biggest problem is its casting. While Willem Dafoe is terrific as Norman Osbourne/Green Goblin and J.K. Simmons is a wonderful J. Jonah Jameson, almost every major character is miscast. Tobey Maguire is a mixed bag as Peter Parker. When he concentrates on the dilemma of the mixed lives he has to juggle on-screen alone (or with Dafoe), he's very good, but comes across totally flat when he actually interacts with his co-stars, particularly James Franco and Kirsten Dunst.
Speaking of Franco and Dunst, how can these two be so charmless and without emotion? Franco does little more than brood, making one wonder why the more chipper Parker would even hang out with such a guy in the first place (Harry Osbourne was different personality-wise in the comics). Kirsten Dunst is the worst bit of comic book-to-film miscasting since George Clooney as Batman. Mary Jane Watson, arguably the most important character in Parker's life, is now little more than a grating redhead who lacks a discernible personality beyond constant superhero doting.
For all that's wrong with the portrayal of those major characters, the origin story is really rather well done. Truth be told, I actually enjoyed this movie quite a bit until Parker suited up as Spider-Man. The character's first CGI appearance is just a total distraction. Perhaps it was unavoidable, but the action scenes look more like cartoons than physical, death-defying showdowns. Unconvincing CGI was probably inevitble, but that doesn't mean I have to accept it.
The movie also blows it in regards to the Green Goblin's motives. True, he initially wanted revenge against the board members that voted against him, but what about after that? Maybe the Goblin aspect of Osbourne's personality is power-hungry, but then again, all the Goblin ever does is blow stuff up. Maybe he just likes to see stuff blow up. If so, that's one of the laziest and lousiest villainous motives I've heard to date.
Truthfully, not every aspect of the movie's central story or the action is as bad as I make it out to be. (moderate spoiler in this sentence) The dichotomy of the hero and villain is fairly interesting and their final mano-a-mano to the death is rather rousing, even if it ends on an idiotic note (was the Goblin trying to intentionally kill himself in the process of killing Spider-Man?)(he didn't have to get up like he did). But damn, those goofy CGI stuntmen and half-bad acting really put a downer on what should have been an exciting and touching summer blockbuster.