Spider-Man as Everyman

Mary Jane is probably the sexiest, sassiest girlfriend any superhero has ever had. Dunst might have seemed too sunshiny for the role (though that quality is also the source of her best comic performances). In red hair and tight, clingy tops, Dunst puts the open sexuality she showed in last year's "Crazy/Beautiful" to new uses. She's like a teen version of the wisecracking dames who inhabited '30s comedy. This girl knows the score. She's a natural cutup: Mary Jane preens and poses as Peter snaps photos of her pretending to be fascinated by a science exhibit. And without warning, she can suddenly go deep and quiet, as those bright eyes cloud over and her buried emotions come to the surface.

Dunst and Maguire have a lovely, quiet scene, while talking in their adjoining backyards at night, that captures the rapport between them without forcing a thing. And they have the movie's single best moment: After Spidey has rescued Mary Jane from a pack of muggers, he hangs upside down into the rain-soaked alley as she peels the lower half of his mask back for a lingering kiss. It's a moment of dark enchantment, and you wish the filmmakers had ventured deeper into that spirit of potent eroticism.

One of the reasons the movie feels a little pokey is that it doesn't seamlessly meld the story of Peter exulting in his new role with the plotline of his fighting the movie's main villain, the Green Goblin. That's the role played by Willem Dafoe, as the tycoon scientist Norman Osborn, who is changed by one of his own experiments into an evildoer bent on -- what else? -- dominating the big city. (The character is also the father of Peter's best friend, played by James Franco, who, the movie leads us to believe, will play an important role in the sequel.)

Dafoe's Green Goblin get-up, a piece of metal body armor, unfortunately includes a motionless mask that hides his face. Luckily Koepp has provided Dafoe with a spectacular scene where Osborn, staring in a mirror, has a conversation as himself and as the Goblin. It's beautifully staged and shot. It's also perhaps the single best piece of screen work Dafoe has ever done. He makes the Jekyll-and-Hyde transitions on a dime, so crystal clear that you actually see him shift personas. The script could have allowed more of Osborn fighting with the evil persona that has taken him over, but Dafoe works to distill all of it in that one sequence. (Unlike many big-budget action pictures, "Spider-Man" actually has a script. Koepp writes good dialogue for the characters, with just enough curlicues to keep it from sounding comic-book flat or comic-book campy.)

There's also a terrific supporting performance from J.K. Simmons (who plays the shrink on "Law & Order") as Daily Bugle publisher J. Jonah Jameson, who's out to prove Spider-Man is a menace. In a salt-and-pepper whiffle and big mustache, Simmons looks so much like the Jameson from the Spider-Man comic that the audience bursts into laughs when it first lays eyes on him. Simmons keeps the laughs coming, chewing his scenes like the fat stogie Jameson keeps stuck in his cake-hole.

"Spider-Man" is a considerably better piece of direction than Raimi's last comic-book outing, "Darkman." He uses the Queens and Manhattan settings to ground the movie in a recognizable reality. And though the CGI effects are disappointing (looking both hyperreal and, inevitably, fake), the first sequence of Spider-Man swinging through the canyons of New York is nicely done. It gives you a sense of the passing landscape as Spidey sees it out of the corners of his eyes as he swoops and rises, straining to get into rhythm. (If sailors find their sea legs, what do web-slingers find? Their air legs?)

There are also little jokes that catch the corner of your eye -- like the Terminix billboard during a Times Square showdown between Spider-Man and the Goblin. While the cinematography, by Don Burgess, is merely serviceable, there is one indelible image: Mary Jane and a cable car full of kids, each reflected in the eyes of Spider-Man's mask, as he must choose whom to save as each plummets toward the water below.

The main problem with Raimi's direction is that he doesn't think big enough. You want him to whip the material up into a heroic froth, to be caught up in something grand and dark and crazy, and he sticks stubbornly to the small, comic-book scale. He doesn't even work up the panache for what should be the movie's comic-emotional high point, the scene where crowds of New Yorkers turn up to cheer on Spider-Man and pelt the Goblin with refuse. You can't quite believe what you're seeing in that moment: Koepp has had the daring (and the heart) to come up with a comic-book version of the solidarity the city showed last fall. Halfhearted as the staging is, the generous daring of it makes you laugh with pleasure.

Perhaps Raimi didn't feel he could work on a bigger scale and keep his eyes on the characters. If that's the case, he made the right choice. I'll take good characters you care about over whiz-bangery any day. But maybe the almost certain success of this movie will give him the courage to take chances in the next one. Often, the second installments of pop-movie franchises, like "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Superman II," have been the best in the series. It's nice to be able to say that "Spider-Man," unlike so many big-budget summer movies, doesn't wear out its welcome.

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