Slack and spiritless, Marvel’s escapade lacks spidery sense
Spider-man: Homecoming 12A cert, 133 min
Dir Jon Watts Starring Tom Holland, Michael Keaton, Jacob Batalon, Laura Harrier, Zendaya, Marisa Tomei, Robert Downey Jr
Alittle of the new Spider-man went an exhilaratingly long way in Captain America: Civil War last year. But a lot of him goes almost nowhere in this slack and spiritless solo escapade.
The big, and theoretically cute, idea behind it is that Peter Parker – now played by the young British actor Tom Holland as a 15-year-old high schooler – has to balance his super-heroic duties with the more prosaic traumas of everyday teenage life. But the film’s action parts are staged with so little nerve or showmanship, and the coming-of-age ones so feebly emulsified from high-school comedies past, that you end up wondering if the two halves were assembled by different teams of genre specialists who somehow ended up with each other’s commissions by mistake.
Still, Holland makes a valiant go of it. At a baby-faced 21, the actor is the youngest of the three recent live-action Spider-men by some distance, and the gawky buoyancy he brought to Civil War’s centrepiece battle makes its welcome return in Homecoming’s opening collage of smartphone video clips – shot by Peter as a kind of behind-the-scenes diary during the events of that film, and featuring the first of a handful of guest appearances from Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark, aka Iron Man.
The thrust of Homecoming turns out to be a series of superhero-themed variations on the old torn loyalties dilemma from countless high-school movies past, in which the big dance contest (or something) turns out to be on the same day as the final exam (or something else). As such, Peter keeps bailing out of house parties, inter-school competitions, and even a late-night swim with his classroom crush Liz (Laura Harrier), in order to thwart whichever part of the Vulture’s villainous scheme is currently in train.
The two characters with the potential to jolt the film out of this rut – Peter’s doting Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) and his sardonic classmate Michelle (an appealing turn from the former Disney Channel starlet Zendaya) – are, for the most part, exasperatingly sidelined. Instead, the female voice Peter develops the richest relationship with belongs to “Karen” (Jennifer Connelly), the on-board computer in his dizzyingly hi-tech new Spider-suit, provided by Stark Industries. That’s upshot number one of a Downey Jr cameo, but the overabundance of gizmos – everything from “instant kill mode” to built-in satellite navigation – only serves to undermine one of the fundamental attractions of Spider-man on film: the swooping intuitiveness of the character’s trapeze-like fluidity in flight (or, if you prefer, swing).
Elsewhere, much of the high-school stuff revolves around Peter and his large, loud and apparently only friend Ned (Jacob Batalon), and their double act seems so desperate to be Superbad (2007) it stings. As for a recreation of the famous garden-to-garden dash from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1987), it might have felt less like a desperate inducement to think of Homecoming as a John Hughes film with superpowers if Peter didn’t run past the original scene from Hughes’s film playing on a television set. Paying homage is one thing, but for all his supposed newfound youthfulness, this Spider-man can feel a little too cobwebby for comfort.