The best comic crossover yet.

Rating: 8/10 (14 June 2002)

This film definitely recreates the engrossing entertainment that a good comic delivers. There is clever humour, exciting action and plenty of reasonable plot complexity to keep you guessing. Tobey Maguire is cast perfectly, and even manages to make the script sound intelligent. Spiderman is completely successful in translating the atmosphere of the Stan Lee/Steve Ditko comic book, and that's a good thing.
Minus points? The Willem Dafoe villain. While Spiderman is a neurotic, error-prone (semi-)human, Green Goblin is a cardboard cutout, a stereotypical sci-fi bogie man - even the graphic style of his costume is wrong, he looks like a 1980's Marvel villain, and doesn't match the perfectly captured vintage webslinger. Maybe his son, in the inevitable SpideyII, will get it right.
That said, this is how superhero films should look!