Spider-Man: Homecoming 2017

B

For some reason I did not see this movie when it came out earlier this year, but it got pretty good reviews so I wanted to see it. I waited until Black Friday and got a great deal on the blu-ray and watched it right away. It is a little disappointing. In the Tobey Maguire series, I stopped watching after the second one when the third got bad reviews. Then I was disappointed with the Andrew Garfield reboot and didn’t watch anymore of those. In Captain America: Civil War, Tom Holland was introduced as Spider-Man being mentored by Iron Man Tony Stark. I don’t know that the integration with The Avengers works as well and is what kind of messes up this movie.

Some of the choices are good: they didn’t go back over the origin story and the loss of Uncle Ben. And Holland is more believable as a high school student though he is still 21 years old playing a high school sophomore. The romance is a little more high schoolish and it shows Peter Parker in school at least. My problem is that the evil scheme here involves Marvel-related alien superpower stuff. So here’s a high school student dealing with incredibly dangerous stuff. He should be calling in the police or Iron Man or any other Avengers, but he is handling it all himself (they try to explain this in the movie, but it didn’t really work for me). This is bad writing. The action scenes are good, the stuff with his friend is good, and the romance stuff is okay, and Michael Keaton is very good, but the overall effort flags a little. Tony Stark does not have much of role and you can almost see the meter running while Robert Downey is on screen draining Sony of their shareholders’ profits, so he didn’t really work enough to contribute substantially and yet the fact that he is there calls into question why he is letting a teenager do all of this without help. The movie is still entertaining, but unfortunately this is second tier Marvel. It gets a B from me.

Written: 25 Nov 2017

Owned on: Blu-ray, DVD