After years of moronic Hollywood action movies, when you go to a summer blockbuster these days you're simply hoping to be only mildly disappointed instead of grossly irritated by the proceedings. So it comes as a joyous surprise to discover that Spiderman 2, against all expectations, is a smart, funny and exhilarating movie that takes us back to when good movies made money, too.

Like Raiders of the Lost Ark and Jaws, Spiderman 2 manages to combine a compelling action plot with good writing, sharp acting and assured visual film-making. Even the love story, usually the squirmingly-bad part of big summer movies, works like a charm.

Director Sam Raimi puts together action scenes that are soaring, operatic tributes to Spiderman's comic book roots, yet at the same time have the grit and grime of reality, as slabs of rusty metal, shards of glass, and 2-ton taxicabs all come flying through the air at our web-slinging hero. Suffice to say that the Matrix directors could learn a thing or twenty from watching this movie.

In an era when a lot of Hollywood movies have an almost fascist edge to them, with superhuman, square-jawed heroes dispensing one-dimensional villains and weakness with bare fists and bad attitudes, it is refreshing to see Spiderman's alter ego Peter Parker fully developed as a lovable schlub who can't even hold down a job delivering pizzas in his "real" life. Raimi's first act is as tightly constructed, and as enjoyable, as a Billy Wilder script, as Parker stumbles from one bad circumstance to another, rings under his eyes from staying out late fighting crime, flunking out of college, and late on his rent. Tobey Maguire is Jack Lemmon in "The Apartment", with a night job as a superhero. It's great fun and wonderfully executed.

Likewise Alfred Molina's villainous Dr. Otto Octavius and his wife (played by Donna Murphy) are cleverly cast as uber-cosmopolitan, T.S. Eliot-reading intellectuals, whose liberal idealism runs amok when the Dr.'s scientific ambitions get the best of him. It's funny and compelling at the same time, and the cybernetic contraption that Octavius welds to himself, however cartoon-like, is considerably creepier than similar devices that pop up in "darker" movies. Indeed, the scene where the wicked sprites in the Doctor's machine sway him from good to evil with their impeccable (but silent) reasoning is a brilliant Shakespearean flourish, like Macbeth being worked into a lather by the witches of the Scottish moors.

The battle Raimi sets into motion between his awkward hero and his romantic villain spins its own web, at the center of which lies a solution not born of violence, but of conscience. Ultimately Raimi turns Spiderman's flights of adventure through the city into a kind of lonely art, a physical release from Peter Parker's limbo, his alienation, and post-adolescent angst. It's hard to think of another superhero movie where you get such a charge out of watching the character fly, run or, here, even fall on his face. Raimi has made Spiderman human, vulnerable, and funny.

The movie's best scene may be when Parker, suffering from a kind of superhero "performance anxiety", goes to a doctor. "I've been having this dream... where I'm Spiderman..." he tells the M.D. "Oh, so you're Spiderman?" the doctor asks wryly. "In my dream," Parker insists, then, growing fidgety: "Actually, it's not my dream, it's a dream a friend's been having."

Spiderman 2 is the dream that Sam Raimi's been having, and it's the kind of movie summers were made for. Highly recommended.