Spider-’boy’ rather than Man
MIDWAY through Spiderman: Homecoming, there’s a sequence that revs the picture up in that buzzy spectacular “Hey, I’m watching a Marvel movie!” way. Peter Parker (Tom Holland), a 15-year-old high schooler from Queens, is in Washington DC, along with a team of his fellow student brainiacs, to attend the finals of the Academic Decathlon.
They’re up in the Washington Monument when a volatile alien weapon explodes, causing a crack along the top of the building’s pointy pillar and trapping the students inside the elevator.
It’s up to Peter to save them, though as Spider-man he’s still figuring out what the heck he’s doing. In his red-and-blue spandex costume, now layered with computer intelligence and a Siri voice, he shimmies up the monument, a vertical crawl shot at dizzying angles (as in, straight down). But it’s a sticky situation. For a few dicey moments, you’re up there with him, doing just what you’re supposed to be doing at a movie like this one. You forget yourself. You escape.
The rest of the movie isn’t bad, but it’s very much down to earth. There’s an aspect of comicbook superhero films that’s more or less encoded in the names of the heroes. Superman. Batman. Iron Man. Wonder Woman. They fly, they scowl, they see through walls, they repel bullets, but they are all grown-ups. Peter Parker is different – especially in Spider-man: Homecoming, where Holland plays him with a gawky, anxious deer-in-headlights teen innocence that’s so fumblingly aw shucks and ordinary that it seems almost incongruous when he’s referred to as “the Spider-man”. What he looks (and acts) like is Spiderboy. Spider-man: Homecoming is the story of a saviour who’s still mucking around in the business of being a kid.
Holland has a likeable presence, but he’s dutiful and imploring rather than captivating. Peter has a best bud, the roly-poly and easily wowed Ned (Jacob Batalon), and he’s got a crush on Liz (Laura Harrier), a senior who’s on the Decathlon team. The biracial romance is a step in the right direction, but at one point the two are poised in an upsidedown kiss that never materialises, which only reminds you of how much the film is feeding off its legacy. It’s fine – and true enough to Marvel – to make a Spider-man movie about a young adult, but Homecoming has an aggressively eager and prosaic YA flavour.
The villain, Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton), is very much an adult. Keaton brings all the sinister, gnashing personality you could want to the role, though the movie should have given him more to do.
We all know the spider-bite basics of Spidey’s origin story, but too much rebooting has now resulted in a certain vagueness, as if the film couldn’t be bothered to fill in the logistics. That said, the flying action has a casual flip buoyancy, and the movie does get you rooting for Peter. The appeal of this particular Spider-boy is all too basic: In his lunge for valour, he keeps falling, and he keeps getting up. – Variety