Billy Elliot stage star is the best Spider-Man yet
Fast, furious and with a stonking soundtrack, this gripping getaway caper gives Tarantino a run for his money . . .
THE spotlight first fell on Tom Holland when he played Billy Elliot in the West End. The boy from Kingston- upon-Thames looked the part then, and he looks it again now, as he takes centre-stage for the first time as the even more nimble Spider-Man, who might never be called upon to perform an arabesque, but can swing between New York skyscrapers like nobody else.
Even with another imminent visit to the Planet of the Apes, this already looks like the blockbuster of the summer. It has oodles of wit, lashings of spectacle. Some purists might think it a little glib, played too much for laughs, but it is never less than immensely entertaining.
In fact I can’t think of a movie from the prolific Marvel Cinematic Universe that I have enjoyed more. Nor of a Spider-Man, despite the previous best efforts of Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield in five films between them, who so perfectly fits the bill not just as the web-slinging superhero, but also as his prosaic, awkward alter ego, 15year-old schoolboy Peter Parker.
It’s a big month for Holland. First he turned 21; now he becomes Marvel’s latest superstar. He is absolutely terrific: Entirely convincing as an ordinary teenager uneasily coming to terms with his remarkable powers.
This is not his debut in the iconic red-andblue costume. He had a small but satisfying supporting role in last year’s Captain America: Civil War. But this time the story is all about him, and he rises to the occasion – boy, how he rises, even to the top of the Washington Monument, when an explosive device threatens those inside.
The picture, directed by Jon Watts, opens with a prologue set shortly after the Avengers’ last battle, which requires an awful lot of clearing up. In charge of the operation is a contractor called Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton), at least until the suits from the Department of Damage Control pull rank.
Suitably aggrieved, eight years later Toomes has become a dastardly arms dealer with an alter ego of his own: Strapped into a metal birdsuit, he is transformed into the Vulture. It feels like a Hollywood in-joke. Keaton, the star of Birdman, properly spreading his wings.
Once upon a time in the superhero genre, Keaton also championed the forces of law and order as Batman. But this character plays even more to his strengths. Yes, he’s a villain, quite happy to empower criminals with deadly weapons and eliminate disrespectful henchmen, but he’s also a devoted family man, who generates something close to empathy with some genuinely wellfounded, class-based grievances about the elitist Avengers.
MEANWHILE,after so briefly flexing his superpowers last time out, Peter is back home in Queens, living with his Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) and serving an internship with Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jnr), who acts as his condescending mentor.
At high school Peter is on the quiz team and something of a geek. Little do his classmates know that he’s also the neighbourhood crime-buster, at least until the secret is discovered by his best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon, an unabashed scene-stealer all the way through the movie).
In his school clothes, Peter has all the usual adolescent hang-ups, including what he assumes to be an unrequited crush on lovely Liz (Laura Harrier) from the quiz team. Even in his Spider-Man get-up he can be pretty hapless, and doesn’t seem entirely equipped for a life-or-death showdown when finally he encounters Vulture. Spider-Man has to prove that he’s not just a boy in a man’s costume; he has to win his spurs. In a way, this is an old-fashioned coming-of-age tale.
It is exhilaratingly well told, with one really great, entirely unexpected twist that was greeted by a preview audience at the Odeon Leicester Square last night with spontaneous cheers and applause. There were a lot of chuckles, too. Spider-Man: Homecoming is more a comedy with thrills than a thriller with laughs.
Its only real flaw is a surprising one; some of Spider-Man’s acrobatics look too obviously forged in the special-effects lab. But there are also some truly spectacular setpieces, including one on the Staten Island ferry that, gloriously, reminds us of the real meaning of Marvel.
Spider-Man: Homecoming comes out next Wednesday.
EDGAr WrIGhT, writer and director of the thrilling Baby Driver, hails from sleepy Somerset. Of course, everyone has to come from somewhere — Alfred hitchcock was a son of drab, suburban Leytonstone.
But it’s still kind of marvellous that a fellow who grew up in the shadow of the Mendip hills, and whose last film, 2013’s The World’s end, was inspired by a teenage pub-crawl he once went on in Wells, has now created a roaringly high-octane crime movie reminiscent of the best of Quentin Tarantino.
Baby Driver is set in Atlanta, Georgia. Its hero is a fresh-faced getaway driver, nicknamed Baby (Ansel elgort), whose job is to whisk ruthless, armed bank-robbers from the scene of their latest heist.
This he does brilliantly, but he is a reluctant participant, coerced into high-stakes crime by a gangster called Doc (Kevin Spacey), as payback for once trying to steal Doc’s car.
So far, so unoriginal. Indeed, Wright makes a virtue of filling his film with plotlines so familiar they almost count as clichés. We’ve all seen a million heists, car chases, menacing Mr Bigs, and protagonists falling for sweet waitresses in diners, which is what happens here to Baby, as soon as he sets eyes on Debora, winningly played by Lily James.
She is a dreamer, a romantic, whose ambitions extend no further than heading west ‘on 20, in a car we can’t afford, with a plan we don’t have’. And she reminds Baby of his dead mother, who — another cliché — he keeps picturing in flashbacks.
So what turns the clichéd and commonplace into virtues? It’s the way Wright, sometimes obviously, sometimes with deft subtlety, references other films. There are repeated nods to Tarantino’s reservoir Dogs, for example, and to Walter hill’s 1978 film The Driver. The Pixar animation Monsters, Inc. actually gets a namecheck.
And when Baby loses one lens from his sunglasses during a getaway, Wright plainly intends it as a homage to Warren Beatty’s character in the iconic ambush scene from Bonnie And Clyde.
But there is something else, something more that stops this film looking stylish, but essentially derivative, and makes it excitingly, enticingly original. It is, in a word, music.
Baby has been left with tinnitus from a childhood road accident that killed both his parents. he drowns it out by plugging his iPod into his ears, turning his life into one long playlist.
When he waits outside banks for Doc’s everrotating crew, when he out- screeches the pursuing cops, even when he sits in on briefings for the next job, his constant companions are rock, r&B and disco music.
he even mixes his own tracks, secretly recording snatches of his accomplices’ conversations, then going home and turning them into his own, rather literal, version of gangsta rap.
Baby lives with his ageing, deaf foster father, Pops (CJ Jones), who knows the boy has a good heart but has fallen in with some dodgy characters.
And my, are they dodgy. Apart from Doc, they include a trigger-happy psycho called Bats (Jamie Foxx) and the scarcely less scary Griff (Jon Bernthal), neither of whom are comfortable in the company of the kid with the iPod fixation. Buddy (Jon hamm) seems more congenial, but then he has a respectable background as a banker. now he’s a gamekeeper turned poacher, on the run with his lap- dancer girlfriend, Darling (eiza Gonzalez).
Wright keeps the action more real and less exuberantly comedic than in his most successful films, Shaun Of The Dead (2004) and hot Fuzz (2007). he certainly doesn’t rein in the violence, which at times is gruesome and, it has to be said, somewhat glorified. But his playful side is never far away, even when things start to look deeply worrying for Baby, who is forced into one final raid on a post office just when he thought he had paid his dues. Will he get to head west on 20 with lovely Debora, or will he have to face the music?
All I’ll tell you is that it’s a blast and a joyride finding out. I think that if you love car chases, you’ll love this movie; Wright choreographs them superbly. And if you love music, you’ll probably love this movie; the soundtrack features something for everyone, including Queen, T.rex, The Beach Boys, The Damned, Dave Brubeck and, of course, singing the title song, Simon & Garfunkel.
I was going to add that if you love movies, you’ll more than likely love this movie, except that my wife has just come back from seeing it at
the Odeon Hereford on my thunderous recommendation — and pronounced it deeply disappointing, with ‘risible’ dialogue and ‘silly’ characterisations.
And her two friends thought the same. So maybe Baby Driver is this season’s La La Land, for which the critical hosannas were so loud that some audiences went away unimpressed. All the same, I’ll stick my neck out and anoint it with the full five stars.
In Alone In Berlin, a decent, unremarkable, rather stolid couple called Anna and Otto Quangel (beautifully played by Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson) also stick their necks out, sounding their own feeble but stubborn counterblast to the nazi regime as World War II unfolds. Vincent Perez’s film is based on Hans Fallada’s compelling 1947 novel of the same name, which in turn told the true story of a husband and wife who are left grief- stricken by the death in battle of their only son.
Otto, a factory foreman, channels his hurt into a series of postcards, on which he writes treasonous messages damning Hitler and the German war effort.
With Anna’s help, he discreetly leaves the cards all over the city, much to the growing fury of the SS. The film’s tension stems from the efforts of a clever police chief ( Daniel Bruhl) to track the miscreants down, but actually what I admired about it was its defiant lack of melodrama.
There is no chorus of jackboots crunching on gravel (which must be a first for a film set in Berlin in 1940), and, unlike the book, there’s no real indication that the propaganda has had the slightest effect in encouraging meaningful dissent against the nazis.
Of the 285 cards that Otto writes, 267 are handed straight to the authorities.
Instead, there is just a creeping sense of menace as the net closes around the Quangels, while Thompson and Gleeson, with their studiously understated yet powerful performances, show the nobility embodied in even futile resistance.
I found it a deeply moving film and a worthy monument to a pair of decidedly unlikely war heroes.