Spider-Man reboot earning early praise
Homecoming a return to form for webslinger
In this century, each U.S. presidential administration gets its own Spider-Man reboot.
In the Trump era, it falls to Sony and Marvel to reach across the Hollywood aisle and make us care about the third Spidey reset in 15 years.
Fortunately, critics seem to be saying the studios have found a winning star in 21-year-old British actor Tom Holland, the nimble, sweet-faced lad who spent part of his adolescence dancing on the London stage in Billy Elliot.
Overall, last Thursday’s first wave of reviewers had positive marks for Spider-Man: Homecoming, which opens wide July 7.
The early reviews appreciate that Spider-Man invigorates superhero tropes with hallmarks from the teen-movie genre — this is the second superhero film in a year to pay direct homage to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (Deadpool has a post-credit scene nod to the iconic movie).
Homecoming’s average score on Metacritic is hovering around the best tally for a solo Spider-Man feature film since 2004, when Tobey Maguire’s second webslinger outing was released. The new Jon Watts film also has a very high “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
That spells good news for Sony, which saw its two recent Amazing Spider-Man films, directed by Marc Webb and starring Andrew Garfield, dim the lustre of the franchise — though to many fans, 2007’s Spider-Man 3 remains the worst.
“Where Garfield’s Peter Parker displayed a believable 21st-century angst, we return largely to the character’s wide-eyed roots with Tom Holland, whose performance is thoroughly winning even when the script isn’t helping him,” The Hollywood Reporter writes of Spidey/Parker, the vulnerable teen superhero created 55 years ago by Marvel’s Stan Lee and Steve Ditko.
The highlights in this “giddy, fitfully entertaining” movie, IndieWire writes, “gleefully conflate the likes of Stan Lee and John Hughes, delighting in the extent to which both of their signature genres tend to revolve around emotionally unsure young people who are struggling to juggle their double lives.”
The USA Today review states: “Holland not only looks the part of a 15-year-old, but portrays the needed vulnerability, immaturity and jocularity of his comic-book counterpart that was sorely missed in previous movie incarnations,” adding, “Homecoming becomes the perfect teen movie that you never realized Marvel needed.”
The Guardian likewise lauds Holland as “sensational: funny, awkward and believably vulnerable, adding a necessary tension to his early attempts at superheroics.”
The Wrap calls the film “a sugar-fuelled adolescent itself: usually you’re on its hopped-up wavelength, but sometimes you’re just taking a breather to admire the energy level.”
With measured praise, Variety writes: “Coming after the two Andrew Garfield Spider-Man films, which were the definition of super-forgettable competence, the movie is just distinctive enough, in concept and execution, to connect and become a sizable hit. If so, it could prove a key transitional film in the greater cinematic universe of comic-book movies. Homecoming tells its audience: This kid isn’t quite super — he’s just like you.”
The New York Daily News finds a nagging flaw: “For all of its charming and infectious realism about race, high school life and class issues, it has a bit of a woman problem. Simply: every significant and semi-significant female character looks like a model. It wouldn’t be an issue were the film not so spot-on with casting such a realistic variety of men and teenage boys, or if it were less concerned with hammering down on the ‘Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) is hot’ bit that goes a little too far, but when taken together you start to wonder if maybe things would have been different if just one of the six screenwriters was a woman.”