Nearly two decades into this seemingly never-ending era of the superhero, the big movie studios are left with a conundrum. How do you get audiences to keep coming through the turnstiles, given the inevitable diminishing returns that accompany churning out the bajillionth reboot of the most tired and moribund franchise?
Increasingly, the answer — particularly for the fine folks at Marvel — is to reinvent the notion of a "comic-book movie" from being a genre unto itself into an all-encompassing brand that can take just about any cinematic form one can imagine. Thus, for Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the Russo brothers found inspiration in the paranoid conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s. For 2015's underrated Ant-Man, director Peyton Reed made a good old-fashioned heist movie.
With Spider-Man: Homecoming — the third time in just 15 years that the web-slinging wall-crawler has been launched in a new franchise, although for the first time under the aegis of the Marvel Cinematic Universe — director Jon Watts made the correct decision to place Peter Parker in a setting that very much has the feel of a high-school melodrama, not unlike the celebrated classics John Hughes made in the 1980s. To the extent that the film succeeds, and quite a bit of it does succeed, it's because it delivers the things you want in a teen film. To the extent that it falls short — and unfortunately, there is a bit of that, as well — it's because it embodies the sorts of things you've come to expect from a comic-book movie.
The biggest upside to setting this tale in Midtown High School (here, styled as a magnet or charter school with the ponderous title Midtown School of Science and Technology) is that it allows the filmmakers to recapture the feel of the original Stan Lee-Steve Ditko run on the comic from 1962 to 1966 (including a near frame-for-frame recreation of the most famous panel Ditko ever drew). Tom Holland, introduced to audiences in last year's Captain America: Civil War, is the first actor to don the red tights to play Peter not as a sad sack, but as the wisecracking and hyperactive (if also dweeby and insecure) regular 14-year-old that hooked comics fans back in the Silver Age. Holland's Peter enjoys being Spider-Man, and that enjoyment proves particularly infectious for audiences who've grown accustomed to one too many "grim and gritty" takes on superherodom.
The film also successfully evokes the Lee-Ditko era with its depiction of New York City — and particularly, Peter's native Forest Hills, Queens — as a place that looks and feels like the real New York, even if almost none of it was actually filmed there. By mostly keeping Peter literally down-to-earth, rather than swinging high from Manhattan's skyscrapers, the film allows viewers to experience Queens as a real neighborhood, with low-rise brownstones and uncomfortable public transit and the obligatory bodega cat. Contributing to the verisimilitude is that the cast at least passably reflects Queens' status as the nation's most ethnically diverse county. Peter is smitten with a popular biracial girl named Liz (Laura Harrier). His best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon, offering great comic relief) appears to be Filipino. Just as in the comics, Peter is bullied by Flash Thompson, but rather than being a white football player, this movie's Flash is a snobby South Asian rich kid played by The Grand Budapest Hotel's Tony Revolori. And stealing more than a few scenes is Zendaya, the latest impossibly talented triple-threat ingénue from the Disney Channel, as the acerbic sketch-artist loner Michelle.
Give me a movie that focused entirely on the dynamics between these kids, with a bit of spider-shenanigans on the side, and I'd be sold. Despite a team of six screenwriters (never a good sign), the dialogue is pretty sharp and frequently laugh-out-loud funny. The writers wisely eschew going the origin story route, given that we've seen it twice already in the recent past. Alas, the film's actual plot machinations take us back into more familiar comic-book territory, with intertwined storylines about the orphaned Peter trying to prove himself to his substitute father figure, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr., who appears to be going through the motions at this point just to cash a paycheck) and his clash with this film's big baddie, Adrian Toomes, played by Michael Keaton.
Toomes, aka "The Vulture," is among the oldest Spider-Man villains, but has never really been one of the more memorable members of the rogue's gallery. Of course, the meta-joke in casting Keaton — who remains best-known from Batman, and whose recent comeback was kicked off by playing a has-been actor, also trying to make a comeback, who was best known as the superhero Birdman — is, here, essentially playing Birdman for real. A blue-collar foreman of a salvage demolition crew, Toomes ends up on the wrong side of the law when he sees how much money there is to be made in stealing alien weapons technology from the government and selling it to his fellow scofflaws. Keaton exudes menace, and gives it his hammy best when the script tries to pitch him as a Trumpian underdog taking on a rigged system. But the bottom line remains, as a central villain, The Vulture is a bit of a turkey.
And unfortunately, the film is at its weakest and most predictable whenever its hero and villain square off. Much of the action is of the nighttime aerial CGI battle variety, which makes it impossible to track what the hell is going on. The Staten Island Ferry scene that's excerpted heavily in the trailers feels like it's just blatantly recycling the train scene from Spider-Man 2. Even an otherwise compelling action set piece filmed outside the Washington Monument is sapped of some of the excitement it could have had by the poor decision to import the "Tony Stark exchanges witty banter with his robot assistant" meme to the Spidey suit.
Holland is signed up to reprise his role in the next Avengers film, and one has to believe he and Watts likely will be invited back for a sequel if they care to make it. I hope they do. While Spider-Man: Homecoming might only be about three-quarters of a great comic-book movie, it does manage to capture something that has proven all too elusive in so many others: fun.
