Review of Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) by Phil S — 30 Jul 2017

In the now immortal words of Van Jones, the best way I can sum up this film is that it's just a big nothing burger. Almost nothing of consequence happens in it, and I don't just mean this in the sense that there's no earth-shattering event that shakes the foundations of New York, but also in the sense that Spidey himself undergoes very little interesting development.

The entire movie centers around Peter's desire to win over Tony's approval, and that's about it. There's just not enough substance there for investment. Marvel does try to throw in some extra subplots to flesh out the runtime with Peter juggling his school life with his superhero life, but none of it ever feels like it really tests Peter's character beyond some fleeting moments of mild stress.

It's all incredibly superficial. Most of the comic book characters as they were originally conceived were thrown out the window in favor of what was clearly a diversity quota for this film, but once again it's purely surface level stuff.

It doesn't bring anything interesting to the table in doing so. Peter's relationship with his new girlfriend is barely developed and ends up going nowhere. The new "MJ" is merely reduced to a series of punchlines and memes.

Given that they seemed to have no interest in following the original comics and yet threw in Ned, I'm not sure why they didn't just skip ahead to Miles Morales' story and be done with it. At least then the diversity quota wouldn't have felt so forced.

Peter himself also seems to be mischaracterized purely so they could make these other characters relevant in the plot. For example, the narrative conveys the nerdy side of Pete's personality only in the sense that he's awkward and unpopular in school, but not in the sense that he's actually a smart guy.

He constantly fumbles around with his suit, Ned does all the coding work for him, while Tony did the costume. Peter himself doesn't really make things or seems very resourceful as he was in the comics.

Finally, there's the Vulture. Michael Keaton brings great talent to the role, and he's arguably one of the most sympathetic Marvel villains yet, but that's setting a low bar anyway. His rivalry with Spider Man still feels underdeveloped, which makes the final act especially problematic because by this point in the plot Peter has lost his suit, so he's wearing a goofy slapdash substitute outfit instead that ruins his coolness factor.

Now there are two things that generally make a good action scene. Tension and Rule of Cool. You can usually get away with leaving out one of these elements, but not both. In Homecoming's case, the final confrontation with the Vulture neither contains tension because the rivalry isn't built up and there's no real sense of danger, nor does it contain Rule of Cool because Pete looks like a doofus in his poor man's Spidey costume.

So the whole final fight just feels like filler done out of obligation because it's what a superhero film is expected to do. Now despite all of these shortcomings, Spider-Man: Homecoming does manage to be competently directed, well-acted, and even fun at times, but you really could just skip the whole thing and feel like you haven't missed any important context for whatever comes next with everyone's favorite wall crawler.