Spider-man: Homecoming

Seen 6th July

First we had Tobey Maguire donning the infamous red suit for three movies in the early 2000’s. When he became unavailable the franchise rebooted and the suit went over to Andrew Garfield for the 2012 reboot The Amazing Spider-Man. Then this time, I’m guessing because having a guy pushing 30 playing a high schooler is creepy, they grabbed Tom Holland to try on the tights. Can we keep him? I like this one.

Spider-Man: Homecoming picks up relatively soon after the epic airport fight sequence in Avengers 2. We get a little scene where we see a good bit of the fight from Spidey’s POV since he was recording it on his phone. It’s a really great little sequence to set the mood and shows that what we saw from Holland in The Avengers 2 was not a fluke. This guy clearly is loving the part, he’s taken the character to a new place and kept him consistently fun and quippy. Yay for not having a dark brooding Spidey. They make him the kind of Spider-Man a lot of us think of, a teenager who just discovered he can do cool things and want’s to do all the cool things he can.

The villain of the movie is Vulture played by Michael Keaton who just kills it. He is such a great imposing villain who has some of the most intense scenes in the movie, including a particularly terrifying confrontation with Spidey outside of a school prom. There’s a few moments where I swear Keaton is channeling The Joker from the original Batman movie and I genuinely love it, it’s in his facial expressions where you can see hints of Nicholson peeking out. They also never really reference the fact that he was Batman, not even a passing joke to it other than the fact that you got arguably the best movie Batman to play the villain.

This movie has two of the greatest bits of Marvel Trolling that I’ve seen. First is the casting of Keaton and… seriously, can Marvel just go through a ton of old DC movies, find the heroes of those movies and get them to play villains in future films? Because having a DC hero playing a Marvel villain is one of the greatest subtle middle fingers that I’ve seen in cinema. It’s a very subtle troll. The unsubtle troll is that the high school jackass is called “Flash” and they point blank tell him that being fast is nothing next to being right. They make him into the movie’s punching bag, repeatedly calling him ‘Flash’ and it’s exactly as awesome as you think it is.

Also a lot of props for not only not using the same villain as the last 2 reboots (Green Goblin is nowhere to be seen!) but for picking a completely different love interest. It’s nice of them to dig a little beyond Mary Jane and Gwen Stacey, actually making this movie it’s own thing. It’s a proper reboot, a new tone with new characters and a whole new setup. It all works really well… with some exceptions.

I’m sick of fuddy duddy Iron Man. I know he’s trying to grow up and be more than the playboy but I’m sorry, I can’t take a lecture from him seriously and I never will. Captain America? Sure, he can lecture his ass off. Thor? Sure, I’ll go with it. Hulk? Why not. But Iron Man? The billionaire former-playboy played by Robert Downey Jr? No, I can’t be bothered and frankly it makes him seem like an asshole/hypocrite whenever he tries to act like he wouldn’t have done literally the same thing he’s telling Spidey off for and I just can’t stand it.

Can we soon be done with the “Superhero promises to be somewhere but ends up going to fight crime and disappointing the normies” plot? It happens a lot in this movie (And in about a thousand other Superhero movies) and while I get that secret identities are important, they haven’t been that big a deal in this universe for a while. Everyone knows  that Tony Stark is Iron Man, everyone knows Steve Rogers is Captain America, the school could handle learning that Peter Parker is Spider-Man.

In general a great start for this new Spider-Man, he carried a movie on his own and I can’t wait for more.

8/10

 

Oh, post credits. There’s 2 post credits scenes. The first is plot relevant so I’d stick around for that one if I were you, the second one is a joke ending about Patience… because Marvel knows for a fact that you will sit till the very end and they are laughing at you because you do it. So if you wanna see that scene stay till the very end, but it’s not plot heavy or particularly knee slapping in it’s hilarity so you can make your own mind up on that one.