Run away, run far away and shake your head all the way from the boxoffice.

Rating: Null/10 (28 May 2002)

SPOILER ALERT...You have been warned. Contrary to the seeming opinions of countless movie-going Americans, Spiderman is one of the worst movies that I have ever seen. After viewing the film this weekend, it is unfathomable that it has been elevated to the status of the top 10 grossing films of all time. The plot is positively adolescent and the script has about as much substance as one of the thin comic books from which the film received its inspiration. The casting is questionable at best, although it might have been successful were it not for the woeful inadequacies of the script. The film (and its dialogue) were horrendously predictable, to the point that one simply had to imagine the worst possible line and they would have predicted what phrase was coming. ("When I was up there, it wasn't him I was thinking about...it was you, Peter!") Gag me. When the film wasn?t drooling with sap, it was busy violently stumbling its way through cheesy action sequences. The few such sequences that there were, were hardly enough to entertain let alone complete a film of such supposed scale. Perhaps the worst aspect of the film (besides its clunky and mishandled beginning and middle parts) was its ending. The film easily set up (from the very FIRST line!) that Pete had been pining away for Mary Jane since he first knew how to pine. Pete does an excellent job of perpetuating (and developing) this relationship until the film's final scene when Mary Jane FINALLY confesses his love for him and HE TURNS HER DOWN FLAT!!! I understand the whole "I'm a superhero, I'm supposed to live this life of lonely desolation" thing, but one does not spend 2 hours setting up a scenario only to turn around on a dime and abandon it for no apparent reason in the last 5 minutes of the film. That?s not good storytelling, folks. Furthermore, Spiderman's core value, to help those in need seems to fly out the window when it comes to the person he cares for the most. Not only does M.J. have no real family, but she has virtually no job, and she has just dumped her wealthy boyfriend. The ONLY thing she has of any value at this point in the film is Peter. And what was his response? To abandon her! Some superhero. Far from being an admirable comic book-comes-to-life story, this is instead a nauseating teenage sap-ridden piece of filth that doesn't deserve the respect of the movie going public, let alone $300 million if its money.