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MOVIE REVIEW
(4 STARS) SPIDER-MAN (PG-13). Your friendly neighborhood web- spinning Marvel Comics superhero, the neuroses tweaked, the action at full throttle. Kinetic, romantic and great fun. With Tobey Maguire, Willem Dafoe, Kirsten Dunst, Rosemary Harris, James Franco, Cliff Robertson. Screenplay by David Koepp, based on the comic book by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. Directed by Sam Raimi. 2:01 (adult language, intense action). At area theaters.
The Hamlet of superheroes, Spider-Man arrived on the scene in 1962 and immediately reinvented the comic book. It wasn't enough anymore to have powers far beyond those of mortal men: You had to reach an existential accommodation with your singularly strange place in the universe. All the while, of course, kicking major butt.
Spider-Man's angst may have been toned down in Sam Raimi's playfully thrilling adaptation of the now 40- year-old Marvel comic; the butt-kicking has not. Neither has the aesthetic, one of sinew, grace and a flagrant defiance of gravity. Speaking strictly in terms of commerce, "Spider-Man" - which is much more the Raimi of the facetious "Army of Darkness" than the more recent "The Gift" - is the movie to beat this summer. Speaking...