avarage

Rating: 5/10 (10 June 2002)

The film the fans have been waiting for should have been the tagline for this film. Only a fan could forgive Sam Raimi the basic mistakes, which made this okay start to the spiderman film franchise nearly mediocre. Tobey Maguire is superb and does come across as a near perfect Peter parker and could have been drawn straight from the mind of Stan Lee (who puts in a great cameo). William Defeo brilliantly hams it up as the psycho Green Goblin, and the rest of the cast work well with what they've been given. I must give a thumbs up to J.K Simmons he was J. Jonah Jameson to perfection, Please come back for the next movies. So with all this praise for the actors what went wrong?
The script for one thing, it had moments of genius the scene with Peter being ripped off by the fight promoter up to the confrontation with uncle Ben's killer. The scene where Spiderman takes out the armoured car robbers and poses for the camera going off, and any scene, which involved J.J.Jameson. See the pattern, any scene that the writers took straight out of the comics worked perfectly the scenes they tried to write themselves didn't. Then there's the effects directors and studios need to learn that super-fast moving humans/superheroes don't look good yet when done by computers, take Blade2 (fight scene in the warehouse with Danny john-Jules) and Harry Potter (Quiddich match) The scenes with Spiderman swinging through the city were great.
To sum up. This is a okay film if only for some superb acting but its a fan film and doesn't appeal to a wider audience and may leave a lot of people disappointed. Hopefully the 2nd film will be better but the studio should not expect it to be as big as this one.