Stuck on you

The action's top-notch but it's the love interest that really makes Spider-Man great, says John Patterson in his look at US releases

It was an unusual weekend for American movies: audience size was for once directly, rather than inversely, proportional to the quality of releases. One had to club, kick and claw one's way to the head of the many long lines for Sam Raimi's keenly awaited Spider-Man. Elsewhere, one could stretch out across 11 seats and still not disturb the few other hapless cinemagoers who had been robbed of eight bucks to see dross like Deuces Wild or Woody Allen's fourth failure in a row, Hollywood Ending.

A big-screen Spider-Man has been in the pipeline for decades, with no end of directors signing on and off, and a long history of legal battles with the Marvel Comics empire has only made things more difficult. The choice of Raimi to direct, however, is an inspired one, given the comic-book clarity and vigour of his other movies. The Evil Dead trilogy owed a great debt to the gross-out ultraviolence of EC Comics in the 1950s, and his comfort with superheroics was evident in Xena and Hercules, the two 1990s action-TV shows he developed and produced.

Although the webslinging and villain-stomping are vivid and spectacular, what one enjoys most is the relationship between Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) and Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst), the siren-next-door he has loved since he was six. "This story, like any story worth telling, is all about a girl," intones Maguire at the beginning, when he's still the nerdiest kid in high school. His polar opposite and main tormentor is Mary Jane's jock boyfriend - the first to taste Spidey's powers once they're acquired - while his best friend is Harry (James Franco), handsome but miserable son of Willem Dafoe's Norman Osborn, a millionaire military contractor. Osborn Senior's alter ego, the venomous Green Goblin, will become Spider-Man's principal antagonist, just as his son becomes Peter Parker's rival for Mary Jane.

Raimi keeps things simple, not stupid. The detail and passion in the love story are as important as the special effects that allow our superhero to swing down Madison Avenue and over tenement rooftops suspended by a silky thread. Maguire and Dunst, each with huge eyes and innocent appeal, are a lovely couple - or would be, if he could only share his secret, since she loves Spider-Man rather than Parker. Dafoe, the best actor to play a supervillain since Jack Nicholson's Joker, portrays Osborn as a man who doesn't even realise he's also the Green Goblin, bringing an unusual pathos to the part.

And so to Deuces Wild, a movie that looks as if it has been sitting on a warehouse shelf for years. It's another of those movies principally composed of ideas, scenes, characters and production values copied from better movies like Goodfellas. It's about a Brooklyn turf war in the summer of 1958. Steven Dorff leads the lunk-headed Deuces against the lame-brained Vipers as the real mob moves in on the neighbourhood.

Dozens of character actors are wasted: Norman Reedus, James Franco, Brad Renfro, Frankie Muniz (before his voice broke, hence my suspicions about the movie having been shelved), plus a bevy of Sopranos cast members including Big Pussy himself (Vincent Pastore) as a priest. Alongside them you find every Italian-American cliche since On the Waterfront: Dion and the Belmonts, stickball games, Guido's Pizzeria, rooftop pigeon-coops and a West Side Story, inter-gang love affair. It barely deserved the audience of three I saw it with.

Likewise Hollywood Ending, in which Woody Allen plays an arthouse director working on a big-budget Hollywood movie. The lameness of Woody's schtick is paralleled by the suspicion that he can no longer lure big-name stars into working on his flicks for peanuts. Everyone in the cast is a has-been waiting for a break: George Hamilton, Téa Leoni, and Tiffani Thiessen, formerly the scheming little tramp in Beverly Hills 90210. But Hollywood Ending won't be giving their careers a boost any time soon. Or Woody's.

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