Spider-Man: Homecoming, review: Proves Tom Holland can carry a film

Jon Watts, 133 mins, starring: Tom Holland, Michael Keaton, Jon Favreau, Zendaya, Donald Glover, Tyne Daly, Marisa Tomei, Robert Downey Jr

Spider-Man: Homecoming is a Marvel superhero film done in the style of Tom Sawyer or Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Tom Holland’s Peter Parker, one of the liveliest characters in last year’s Captain America: Civil War, now has an entire movie devoted to him – one with plenty of youthful snap and crackle.

The story has a local feel and is all the better for it. Peter isn’t trying to save the world or battling evil in exotic locations. A brief trip to Washington apart, he stays at home. His stomping (and climbing) ground is the corner of New York where he lives with Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) and where he goes to school. He’s not a fully fledged Avenger yet and his patron Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr) encourages him to stick for the time being to being “a friendly, neighbourhood Spider-Man.” When he is not in costume (and sometimes when he is), he hangs out with his best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon), a roly-poly figure who holds super-heroes in awe.

It goes without saying that the film is full of in-jokes and self-mocking humour. As played by Holland, Parker is cheerful to the point of facetiousness. He makes his own home movies, refreshingly amateurish affairs when compared to the gloss of Marvel filmmaking, and spends a lot of time sitting in his bedroom. He is more Spider-Boy than Spider-Man.

Michael Keaton won an Oscar for playing an ageing Hollywood superhero trying to re-invent himself on Broadway in Birdman. Here, he’s cast not as Birdman but as Adrian Toomes/ “Vulture,” the villain of the piece. At the start of his film, his salvage company is put out of business by government busybodies. He responds by turning to crime and by using “alien tech” to give himself special powers. Keaton plays the character in bravura fashion, with just enough menace to seem threatening but also with a blue collar everyman quality and a nice line in ironic humour. Just as the teenage Spider-Man here isn’t yet ready for Avenger duty, Vulture isn’t the type of uber-villain who is going to bring about Armageddon. If he was, we know that Iron-Man would come after him. He’s more the flat-track bully type, just about safe enough for the youthful Spider-Man to tackle as his first grown-up assignment.

Homecoming illustrates yet again just how flexible Marvel films are becoming and how the lines between them and more conventional dramas are blurring. This is as much a high school drama about an adolescent trying to make sense of the world as it is a superhero film. Holland’s Spider-Man has a mischievous but very naive quality. He’s desperate to prove himself to Tony Stark. He is a strange mix of self-belief and insecurity. He’s arrogant enough to take on Vulture even though he can barely work out his costume or his superpowers. He has a crush on his lithe, glamorous, high IQ classmate, Liz (Laura Harrier) but, at least at first, is far too much the nerd to do anything about it. “Dude, you’re an Avenger. If anyone has a chance with a senior girl, it is you,” Ned tries to gee him up but with only mixed results. Peter is too busy with his crime-fighting duties to stick around at Liz’s party or to attend the academic “Decathlon” competition in which she is one of the school’s leading lights. At the same time he is trying to save the city, he is still worried about staying out late without permission and falling into Aunt May’s bad books.

Some of the action sequences here are deliberately low key by comparison with those in Avenger or X-Men movies. One of the best has Spider-Man hanging upside down, taking on thugs working for the Vulture who are trying to rob a bank. He wisecracks at the most perilous moments but he doesn’t always get his own way in the fights. He’s a puny teenager, after all, and they have secret weapons that he can’t cope with.

Two of the other big set-pieces – a scene aboard a ferry and one in which Peter’s classmates have some terrifying moments in a lift at the top of the Washington Monument – are spectacular enough in their own way but feel on the generic side. They could easily be slotted in to any other Marvel super-hero movies. The film’s freshness lies less in its special effects or highly choreographed fight scenes than in its likeable portrayal of a typical American teenager – Peter Parker as an In-Betweener. “Just stay away from anything dangerous,” Peter is warned early on, advice which he, of course, ignores completely. His overweight and ever-enthusiastic friend Ned is the perfect comic foil, keeping teachers distracted by pretending that he is using the school computers to watch porn and helping out Spider-Man at times of maximum danger when, by rights, Spider-Man should be saving him.

Homecoming is just one more episode in the ongoing saga of Marvel super-heroes. It proves that Holland’s Spider-Man can easily carry a movie on his own. There’s plenty of scope for spinning off sequels and no sense at all that the cobwebs are showing or that the franchise is anywhere near its sell-by date.