Spider-Man: Homecoming rises above the swamp of summer super heroes

So how many are there now? Spider-Man movies I mean - 5, 7, 38?  No one really knows. I understand several grants have been given to Ivy-League academics to study the question. And that’s usually a problem for an action film series and particularly super hero franchises – version fatigue.  Unless you’re one of those bright young people, it gets hard to keep up with the iterations.  Add on having to track the superhero’s place in the evolving “Marvel Cinematic Universe” and on its chaotic super team The Avengers and it all gets very close to brain surgery. Although there’s been less turnover than in the flavor-of-the-month Batman franchise, we’ve still had three different Spider-Men since we got serious with Toby McGuire at the turn of the century. And it’s not just different actors – these are different types of Spider-Men with different back-stories, slightly different settings and super powers, and a broad range of aunts and uncles. So yeah, continually rebooting different versions of the same hero can be a problem – but it’s not a problem this time. Spider-Man: Homecoming is a good Spider-Man… quite good!

And who knew? We’d seen the dorky-high-schooler-to-Spider-Man story before. And there wasn’t much in the film’s creators’ pasts (Director Jon Watts (Cop Car) and writing team Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley (Vacation)) that would hint at Homecoming being anything more than another very average link in the never-ending Marvel movie chain. But I’ll be darned if the new crew didn’t produce the most charming, funny, and clever Spidey film of the bunch – Go figure? Homecoming stands out from the current drone of super-hero films with strength in both story framework and delivery. Watts and his writing team do an excellent job balancing the interesting new with Spider-Man’s classic foundational story. In this new backstory, the very-young Spider-Man (Tom Holland… who?) has been sort of discovered (see Captain America: Civil War) by Iron Man and is being groomed under Tony Stark’s mentorship to be a future member of the Avengers. That’s new – as is all the cool Stark Industries gear built into Spidey’s shinny suit. This and other new vibes are injected into familiar and important scenes and ideas from the original Stan Lee comic book which include a fine mechanical bird villain – The Vulture (Michael Keaton), a girl friend from some of the first Spidey comics (at least in name), and, of course, Aunt May (significantly upgraded by Marisa Tomei). Watt’s keeps the kid-genius part of the Peter Parker story and the fresh-face and unknown Tom Holland pulls it off with flash and minimal awkwardness. Keaton is great as the bad guy and new-comer Jacob Batalon kills as Parker’s nerd, Lego-Death-Star-building buddy (and “chair guy”).

The new and the old come together in Homecoming to make a very entertaining and witty, as it turns out, summer film. But it’s not just chuckles and grins (although Captain America’s public address announcements and the built-in Spidey suit assistant are dead funny); there are some seriously tense scenes in Homecoming with well-utilized CGI for you crash-and-bash freaks. I like this new Spidey – I hope he comes back. And I hope he stays true to his comic book self and returns as a solo act. The real Spider-Man of comic-book lore was not a huge fan of the whole Avengers thing and had a rocky relationship with that group throughout my young comic book reading years. Here’s to the Marvel-movie-making powers not throwing him in with Iron Man and the rest of the Avengers too soon. If Holland and the gang are as good in future films as they all were in Homecoming, I think Spider-Man will sell a lot of tickets all by himself. 8 out of 10.