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Spider-Man...Spider-Man...Radioactive Spider-Man!
Date of Review: May 13, 2002
The Bottom Line: Spider-man is worth seeing in the theatre, but don't hold your breath for the adventure of your lifetime. You will be let down.
Well, the webslinger finally got his due, and now he has a movie about his life. But at what cost? Though the Spider-Man comic has endured for many years, I don't think the movie will.
The first problem that is obvious about the movie is the poor choice of a villain. The Green Goblin is one of the worst villians that Spider-Man has ever faced. Spider-Man suffers the same problem that the X-Men movie suffered. Both movies suffered because the choice of villains was based on the first villains that the superheroes faced in the comics, and not on research to find an entertaining villain. The Green Goblin was such a lame villain in the movie. He flies on a rocket board and throws exploding pumpkins. Come on! There were so many other villains that Spider-Man faced that would have been better choices for the movie. Venom is an obvious choice. Venom has all of Spider-Man's abilities and none of his weaknesses, becoming a nemesis to Spider-man. But that is just a suggestion.
There is another problem that becomes increasingly obvious as the movie goes on. That problem is the crappy graphics. Sure the graphics are better than some movies, but the computer model of Spider-man was ridiculous. They might as well have inserted an image of Shrek swinging on a spiderweb. The level of realism that the computer generated image of Spider-man achieved was on the same cartoonish level as Shrek. It was a let down on the same level as when we see the Scorpion King in The Mummy II.
The final problem with Spider-man is the long moments that the director threw into the movie to fill the screen with sap. Spider-man was not sappy in the sense that it made you want to cry, but it was sappy in the sense that it paused the whole flow of the movie to interject long monologues by Toby McQuire about how much he loves Mary Jane. And the pauses are totally unnecessary. Any intelligent audience member can figure out that Spider-man has a crush on his neighbor, Mary Jane. We don't need the movie slowed down to a clawl to have him make a long speech to clue us in.
Family Video
