Spider-Man

Make no mistake: "Spider-Man" is director Sam Raimi's film. After all, headliners Tobey Maguire and Willem Dafoe spend much of the movie sporting identity-protecting bodysuits and unreal physical talents as your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man and the villainous Green Goblin, respectively. It's hard for even the best thespian to peek out from under all that to make an impact on the audience, especially while making an impact on his opponent and the surrounding scenery.

Fortunately, Raimi's trademark style has been disturbed not a whit by the pressure of launching what Columbia Pictures no doubt expects to be an obscenely profitable franchise. In fact, he's as light on his feet and in his spirits here as he was in his beloved "Evil Dead" films.

Rather than becoming ciphers, the superhumans take their places in a grand, inviting spectacle that Raimi creates with every means available, sets in motion with smooth but breathtaking acceleration, and never allows to become either overblown or underpowered. Thus "Spider-Man" delivers everything you, or Columbia Pictures, could reasonably expect; it's zippy, fun, suspenseful and rousing. Get your tickets now.

I frankly have no idea whether this film's plot jibes with the comic book's, but it does the job cinematically. Peter Parker is a studious, earnest young man nursing a crush on Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst) and trying not to get his ass kicked in his treacherous public high school. On a fateful trip to Columbia University's entomology lab, he gets bitten by a mutant spider. Overnight, Parker becomes stronger and far more able to climb walls and sense imminent danger and spray webbing of awesome tensile strength than he used to.

Meanwhile, across town, Parker's best friend's father Norman Osborn is in dire straits, needing a useable bioenhancement formula in order to save his company's military contract. Seeking a liability-free test subject for an unproven formula, he uses himself, ignoring the possible side effects of hyperaggressiveness and insanity. Possible becomes definite very, very soon. Outfitted with the best weaponry he can steal from the company he founded, the Green Goblin begins terrorizing New York City. Since Parker's been working for good ever since a dirty hood killed his Uncle Ben, a showdown is inevitable.

When the suits are off, all the actors make good showings. Dunst, blithely beautiful as usual, ferrets out a human side for her pretty-girl-with-problems character. Maguire is well-attuned to the struggles of awkward adolescents, and it's a natural extension for him to show both horror and jubilation at his new powers. The lovey-dovey scenes between Parker and Mary Jane actually convince, as do Parker's conversations with Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson) and Aunt May (Rosemary Harris).

Dafoe never seems quite right even in the beginning, which is all to the good, and digs into the over-the-top speechmaking demanded of him with such gusto that you can both laugh and be horrified at the same time. Cameos from Randy "Macho Man" Savage and "Evil Dead" veteran Bruce Campbell and a spittle-spewing reading of editor J. Jonah Jameson by J.K. Simmons provide fun thespianic touches around the edges.

But this movie could have all those performances and still disappoint without Raimi heading things up. With Raimi at the helm, luridly rich imagery simultaneously puffs up and transcends the lingering comic-book sensibilities. Computer-generated imagery, designed by John Dykstra, is deployed with care and an eye towards the truly spectacular rather than well-executed mundaneness; it's hard to imagine more sweetly satisfying swings through the air down the streets of New York, precisely because they live a little bit outside reality. The fights are balletic rather than bruising, as befits a web-crawler, and once they start coming there are very few moments in the film without one.

Raimi and director of photography Don Burgess move the camera with sureness and deliberation, but almost always keep it moving; they make sure, however, never to overwhelm the pathos with frenetic pace. (Danny Elfman deserves credit for an assist for keeping his skittish, splendidly arachnoidal score mostly silent in these moments.) And Raimi never makes the mistake of taking himself too seriously; it's hard to imagine another director who would let us see Norman Osborn's mouth lurking behind wire mesh at the center of the fanged Green Goblin mask, or punctuate the final fight in quite the shoulder-shrugging way it's punctuated here.

Without lazy self-reference, "Spider-Man" manages to have fun with the clichés of plot and setting that it so energetically embraces, and that is a testament to the powers of Raimi. It's also the crowning touch on what will be, and deserves to be, the first summer blockbuster of the year.

And it was! What a difficult prediction to make. Watch tomorrow as I predict that George W. Bush will make an unfortunate subject-verb agreement error in a speech and that rich white kids' protests against the World Bank and IMF will be hilariously ineffective. I'm a regular Nostradamus in the hizzouse.

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