The preview was better

Rating: 3/10 (17 May 2002)

...and so were the book, the strip, the TV series, and the Saturday morning cartoon. The film must have cost a big fat bundle, but it feels like TV, and everything in it has been done better on TV, as well as in other movies. What was effective in the preview--the one-liners, Kirsten Dunst's delight at being rescued, the exhilaration of the web swinging--falls flat in context because it is inadequately prepared for and because whoever made the preview didn't make the movie. For instance, when Peter is testing out his powers, the big swing across town comes too soon and too easy. Here, and in the other dramatic progressions, big and necessary steps are missing. The actors are miscast, as compared to the comic book or to the script. In addition, they are ill-matched, except for Willem Dafoe and the Ethan Hawke clone playing his son. Dunst doesn't seem like Maguire's lifelong neighbor or his girlfriend (too old, too self-centered, from a different world), Cliff Robertson and Rosemary Harris don't seem like his uncle and aunt, or like husband and wife, and so on. It would be difficult, I think, to match Tobey Maguire with any actor. Even so, he and Dafoe do very entertaining work, given that they're doing solos and they perforce miss certain notes outside their ranges. But between them they carry the movie. My biggest disappointment was in the lack of the surge I had hoped for from Spider Man's flights through the city. I only felt it in the last scene (which I'm pretty sure was given away in the preview); in most of the others the movements are too fast or too dark to be clearly made out, and when they can be, the super-characters often look like computer cartoons, which indeed they are. I suppose the reason their masks are stiff and inexpressive is to enable the actors to be matched more easily with the cartoons, but it weakens the dramatic scenes; we might as well be watching the cartoons. The heavies--Dafoe in his Green Goblin activities (which owe a lot to the Wicked Witch of the West) and Jonah Jameson--are too silly and irritating to be taken seriously. Most of all, the numerous rescues convey no sense of danger or relief, no joy in deliverance or gratitude for the coming of a deliverer, no reason to cheer the hero.
Maybe "2" will be better.