 |
| Tom Holland as a perfect teenage Spider-Man. |
I just saw Spider-Man Homecoming with Jordan and Jake, and loved it.
This is a high school sophomore Spidey,
largely too immature to handle the great responsibilities inherent in great
power but with a lot of a heart. That reminds me pleasantly of the earliest
Stan Lee/Steve Ditko comic books while also managing to refresh the somewhat overworked
superhero genre by marrying it to another popular movie genre: the teenage
comedy.
And Tom Holland is perfect for
that, an actor whose every earnest gesture both charms and rings true.
The villains in these superhero
films have been becoming progressively more relatable, building up to Michael
Keaton as the Vulture, a working-class antagonist who has what is finally a
largely legitimate point of view. He’s right when he tells Peter Parker that,
good lad though he is, there are things about adult existence that he does not
yet understand.
The film is perfectly integrated
into the larger Marvel universe, another aspect that reflects the earliest
comics. Iron Man, Captain America, Happy Hogan and Pepper Potts all show up.
The dialogue is also peppered with understated references to familiar Marvel
characters and events. The Vulture’s high-tech flying equipment springs
logically from the alien and robot invasions that we’ve already seen the
Avengers fight off, and that makes good sense.
Although the comedic aspects of
some of the hero’s early fights were overly belabored — Spider-Man is not that inept — I found the film to be genuinely
suspenseful in a way that none of the lame Andrew Garfield vehicles were.
Because young Peter Parker is really out
of his depth, the sense of danger is heightened.
No comments:
Post a Comment