solid rendition of the comic books

Rating: 8/10 (6 May 2002)

Maguire, Dunst, and Dafoe are all much better actors than the material requires, but their performances add to the fun of this movie. And it is a lot fun. (And you'll certainly get a chance to see them again, since this thing has SEQUEL written all over it.)
They take a few liberties with the comic book (no, I refuse to call it a graphic novel -- anything with 50 words per page that is less than 100 pages long is not a novel), but I thought that they were generally improvements. The special effects are not really astonishing (although I probably should have been astonished; perhaps I'm just jaded), but they were good enough to not detract from the story (I didn't feel the vertiginous rush during the movie that you get from "Soaring over California" at Disneyland, and the scenes of Spider-Man swinging down the street look like a really good cartoon to me).
The movie is good looking and so is the cast (and you get to see a lot of Dunst's cleavage, which I certainly enjoyed). It's a perfect summer movie, a little ahead of the summer. I think that it's too intense for most kids under 10, although there were some kids still in diapers in the theater when I saw it, along with a couple of louts behind me that talked during the movie and kicked my seat repeatedly. And we all liked the movie (although I could have done without the louts).