Spider-Man (2002)

A nebbish young man gets bitten by a radioactive spider and turns into a web-spinning superhero, doing his best to save a city from the clutches of evil, while also trying to impress the girl next door. Yep, it's Spidey-time!

Story

As the famed comic book goes, Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) is your typical geeky teenager. He wears glasses, hangs out with his best friend, Harry Osborn (James Franco), and has a serious crush on Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst), the girl who has lived next door to…

To get the big news out fast, Spider-Man is up, up and away as the firecracker to beat this summer. Working from a script by David Koepp, director Sam Raimi gives this unapologetic fluff a mind, a heart and a keen sense of fun -- all the ingredients missing from, say, The Scorpion King. And the actors seem to be having almost as good a time as we are. The unlikely superhero that Stan Lee created at Marvel Comics in 1962 makes a perfect fit for Tobey Maguire. OK, so maybe a stuntman squeezed into…

Come on. Did it really take two discs to bring the biggest box-office hit of 2002 to DVD? Well, maybe it did to up the list price to $28.96. But, except for a nice interview with Spider-Man creator Stan Lee (it's instructive and fun to see the genesis of his comic-book artistry), the extras are an orgy of self-promotion. The Spider-Man specials that aired on HBO and E! are both softballs and virtually interchangeable.

Tobey Maguire, who plays the high school geek turned superhero thanks to a…