Spider-Man: Homecoming

Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Director: Jon Watts
Actors: Tom Holland, Michael Keaton, Marisa Tomei

Synopsis: Peter Parker (Tom Holland) has a “Stark Scholarship” – a front for being on the radar to join the Avengers. While trying to prove his worth on the streets of New York, he becomes involved with stopping the criminal activities of a gang led by Adrian Toome (Michael Keaton).

Review: Spider-Man has always been by far my favourite superhero. He is the least portentous and most ordinary of fantasy characters, and the whole concept of Spider-Man seems to honour the “boys’ own” spirit of the superhero genre which is, after all, the essence of its inherent charm and popularity.

That said, the cynical trotting out of three separate iterations of Spider-Man in a decade (Tobey Maguire only hung his lycra up in 2007 after Spider-Man 3), has had even me sceptical and disengaged. Particularly as the Andrew Garfield/Marc Webb ‘Amazing’ run was hugely substandard: Garfield is a decent actor per se, but his actorly faux bumbling was horrendously misjudged, and the plots were prototypical exercises in trotting out the usual superhero genre arcs.

Pleasingly, Tom Holland makes for a much more appealing Peter Parker/Spider-Man. He definitely plays up the plucky teen angle (his voice is, at times, ridiculously high-pitched, and he radiates a perpetual air of frenzy), but he is incredibly charming, and he genuinely convinces as someone who could inhabit all the different parts of the Peter Parker psyche. He is both nerd and boffin, but also has the physicality which makes his Spider-Man jaunts believable, and he has enough charisma that makes the interest from alpha-female, Liz, understandable.

Just once or twice, the sense that this genre, its connected universe and the whole Marvel brand, is slipping into tedious self-referentiality and gurning in-jokes grates, but once the story is allowed to relax into itself by about the 30-minute mark, it’s a funny and entertaining adventure with some good, but not overegged (as in other superhero movies), action sequences. Michael Keaton does a great job as the villain of the piece, and the scene where a twist about his character plays out, is actually quite gripping and well acted by himself and Holland. (December 2017)