Sam Raimi: Sell-out

reviewed Fri, 10 May 2002

Many movies have been made about how large sums of money make people do bad things, and clearly this is often true creatively as well.  The inventiveness and high spirits of Sam Raimi's early films, when he had more imagination than money, are notably absent from Spider-Man.  Take, for example, the scenes of Spider-Man swinging through the city.  They're so plainly computer generated.  Now, I read in an article that Raimi had wanted to actually send the camera swinging down the street, but was dissuaded on the grounds that it would be too dangerous  To which I say:  so?  Isn't that what Bruce Campbell is for?  (Campbell does appear in the movie, in an undemanding cameo as the wrestling announcer who coins the name Spider-Man -- hope he got to keep the jacket and the shades.  Personally, I'd have rather seen him bring his charms to the newspaper-editor character, an irritating throwback to the stale, fast-talking, sell-his-own-grandmother-for-a-story stereotype.)  Danger never seemed to stop Raimi from getting a shot before.  But now he's all, like, big-time, blockbuster-movie director, and he has insurance and stuff, and so he can't do anything fun anymore.

Not that Spider-Man isn't enjoyable, but it's lacking the slapdash originality and lightheartedness that I'd hoped Raimi would bring to it.  It's a bit long, and it's sort of a problem for a superhero movie when the superhero parts are the least interesting.  Probably because no part of Tobey Maguire's face is visible when he's Spider-Man, those sequences are far less engaging than the Peter Parker ones.  They're also burdened with straight-from-the-comics-page dialogue (you almost expect to see "Pow!" and "Zap!" balloons pop up) that just doesn't cut it in live action.  I actually winced when Spider-Man refers to the Green Goblin as "Gobby."  And many of the Spider-Man scenes are so obviously computer-generated that you may as well be watching a video game or a cartoon.

As the Green Goblin and his alter ego, evil industrialist Norman Osborn, Willem Dafoe goes appropriately over the top, and as his son Harry, James Dean -- uh, I mean, Franco looks uncannily like his own flesh and blood.  Maguire is fine as the awkward teen Peter Parker/Spider-Man -- his thrill at discovering his powers is engagingly goofy -- but he has no chemistry with putative love interest Kirsten Dunst, who's rather insipid here (and has to suffer through a disgustingly gratuitous wet-t-shirt scene).  And when he walks away from her at the end of the movie, it's with such self-congratulatory martyrdom that you feel like asking him, "What do you want, a medal or a chest to pin it on?"

I'm being picky about a movie that's not really meant to stand up to such critiques (although I dream of a world in which you wouldn't actually have to make a movie reductively simple and uninspired in order to make tons of money).  In the end, what matters about movies like this is, are you entertained?  And I was... most of the time.

So, you may ask, have I learned anything about expecting too much of a comic-book adaptation just because it has an exciting director and a promising young star?  Well, based on my reaction to the trailer for The Hulk -- no.

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