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07/20/2017 12:01 AMRated PG-13
The world may not have needed yet another Spider-Man film, but director Jon Watts (Cop Car and TV’s The Onion News Network) manages to deliver a really good one anyway. Spider-Man: Homecoming is the sixth Spider-Man feature film in the last 15 years, yet it manages to feel fresh and new. Without intending to throw any shade to Tobey Maguire or Andrew Garfield (the two actors most recently tapped to wear the red and blue Spidey suit), Tom Holland is wonderful in the title role of Peter Parker/Spider-Man. He is a young Spider-Man—still in high school (and actually believably so)—and by far the most likable of the three portrayals.
Holland (The Impossible and The Lost City of Z) plays Peter Parker, a nerdy teenage whiz-kid from New York City who lives with his Aunt May (Marisa Tomei of Crazy Stupid Love and The Wrestler) and just found out that he is a somewhat unofficial member of The Avengers. Fresh from visiting with Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr., of The Avengers and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows) and the others, Peter goes to school during the day and acts as his Bronx neighborhood’s local nice guy/superhero in the evenings. He works hard to try to prove himself to Stark through Stark’s unimpressed employee Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau of Iron Man and Chef), but Stark won’t budge on his decision not to allow Peter to venture into any more serious crime fighting until he gets older.
While not at school or hanging out with his best friend, Ned (Jacob Batalon of North Woods and The True Don Quixote), Peter is stopping bad guys in their tracks with his web-slinging heroics. After coming across some mysterious new weapons during an ATM robbery, Peter decides to go off of Stark’s radar and track down the source of these powerful weapons on his own.
Peter first has a surprising first encounter with a couple of low-level bad guys who manage to knock him down repeatedly, but instead of being frightened away, he is doubly determined to get to the source of their weapons. He eventually traces them back to their boss, Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton of Birdman and Spotlight), a pushed-around working-class man who transforms himself into a super-villain called Vulture by mashing together left-over alien technology with new designs in order to provide for his family. When a clever surprise brings Toomes and Peter face-to-face before either one of them intend to do so, the tension mounts.
In addition to Holland being perfect for the role of Spidey, Keaton is an excellent villain with a thoughtful storyline of his own, Tomei is surprisingly right for the role of Aunt May, and scene-stealing Batalon is delightful as Peter’s best friend, Ned.
Surprising precisely no one, Spider-Man: Homecoming is full of plenty of hints toward future films, particularly centering on Michelle, a moody classmate of Peter’s played by Disney darling Zendaya (TV’s K.C. Undercover and Shake It Up). In addition to multiple appearances throughout the film by Stark, Captain America (Chris Evans of Captain America: The First Avenger and Gifted) rather comically shows up more than once in recorded PSA videos that Peter and his classmates have to watch in school.
There is a lot of time spent watching Peter develop into his role of Spider-Man, which makes the more than two hour runtime feel unnecessarily long, but it starts strong, has a lot of humor and action in it, and ends strong, too, making viewers feel like they just might be ready for even more Spider-Man to come in the future.
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