This is the story of Peter Parker and MaryJane Watson...

Rating: 3/10 (4 May 2002)

I have two words for this movie.... teen flick. Regardless of whether I'm speaking as a fan or as a movie-goer, these two words sum up exactly what this movie is. The impression I got from the movie was this...it's a teenage love story between a geek and a slut, oh...and by the way, the geek has super powers...the end.
I think they should've saved us all a lot of money and a lot of grief by calling the movie what it is... "The Life of Peter Parker" because Spiderman actually appeared in less than 20% of the movie. The Spiderman component was so small; it was almost like an after thought that the producers squeezed in later. This movie seems to have started as an old fashion kiddies love story, but since that idea doesn't sell tickets anymore, someone decides to throw in the Spiderman bit. The title is really misleading because I truly felt we're looking at this backwards. The truth is, it's a teenybopper story that used the superpower idea as an excuse to show off their fancy computer work.
This movie did not deliver as a Spiderman Movie; in fact, it didn't even deliver as a movie. The plotline was childishly simple and unbelievably inconsistent; action sequence was nothing but bad knock-offs of expensive camera tricks seen in "The Matrix", "X-Men", "Swordfish", etc. The entire movie looked like it was shot in Queens, NY and the rest was mediocre 3D rendered environments where we see a computer-generated Spiderman swinging from building to building. I'm going to guess that that's where all the money went, because it sure didn't go to the casting of good actors.
Tobey Maguire was a perfect Peter Parker, but a horrible Spiderman. The only real actor that made up for this colossal casting mistake was the performance by William Dafoe as the Green Goblin. He seems to be the only one who actually knew what he was doing, and was performing "in character". Everyone else was merely regurgitating long run-on sentences in corny scenes that were completely irrelevant to the overall plot.
This 2002 version was no better than the 1970's mini movies and the cartoon show. It still looks like some guy wearing a Halloween costume running around the city of Queens. You never wondered why Batman didn't look silly popping out gadgets from the rooftops of Gotham City, or how a group of mutants in tight black costumes wouldn't look odd running through New York. Why? In both "Batman" and "X-Men", the scenery, location, props, characters and dialogue were all created around the superhero, not vice versa. Anyone can just shoot a movie about a guy in a skin-tight outfit who catches poorly themed villains, but not everyone can do it so it doesn't look like one big costume party in your backyard. Once again, this movie is reminiscent of last year's "Tomb Raider", a movie composed of mainly photographic images of Angelina Jolie in her cool poses and badly choreographed fighting sequence, but no substance.
So, if you haven't seen this movie. I suggest you save yourself some money, and just watch the trailers, which, like all movie trailers have spoiled it by showing you all the best parts of the movie. Then basically, leaving you high and dry and unsatisfied with your jumbo popcorn on your lap. I can honestly tell you, it's not going to get any better than what you see in those trailers. Other than this 30-second clip of high tech computer generated images, everything else are fillers.