Official movie poster/ Marvel Studios
“Spider-Man: Homecoming,” directed by Jon Watts, is the latest addition to the Marvel cinematic universe. The fun flick stars Tom Holland as Peter Parker/ Spider-Man.
The plot revolves around Parker attempting to balance his normal relationships at school with his attempts to prove himself to Tony Stark to join the Avengers’ roster full-time.
Watts does a good job mixing genres and turns out a unique film about a character we’ve seen on the big screen five times before. As a result, “Spider-Man: Homecoming” is a combination high-school comedy and superhero movie.
We see plenty of the classic Spider-Man formula, as our hero scrambles day-to-day to manage life as a superhero and a high school student. But we also see Spider-Man in situations and locations we haven’t seen before, like Washington D.C. and the suburbs.
It’s the first time we’ve seen Spider-Man outside of Manhattan and that is refreshing.
Hollywood legend Michael Keaton plays the villain in the film, Adrian Toomes/ The Vulture, providing a sympathetic enemy with more in common with the villains in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films back in the early 2000s than the more recent ones in other Marvel films.
The film is also paced well with action scenes spread across the run time to keep the movie exciting. All of the effects used to show Spider-Man in action are top notch and make it more difficult to tell the difference between the CGI Spider-Man and the real deal.
When action slows, you see a lot of Parker and his friend Ned, played by Jacob Batalon, talking and cracking jokes, not all of which land, but they still provide plenty of laughs to keep you engaged between fun action scenes.
Overall, “Spider-Man: Homecoming” is a fun detour away from the larger scale Marvel story being told in the other films, while also setting the foundation for Spider-Man to enter that larger world in the near future.
4/5 stars
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