★★★
(M) 133 minutes
How many Spideys is too many? Tom Holland, a 21-year-old British kid with boyish good looks, becomes the third Spider-Man in modern movies, after Tobey Maguire (three movies from 2002) and Andrew Garfield (two more, this time with the word "amazing" in the title, from 2012 and 2014).
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It's time to suit up.
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Trailer: Spider-Man: Homecoming
It's time to suit up.
That makes this the sixth Spider-Man movie in 15 years, and the second or third reboot, depending on how you slice it.
How much more is there to say about the American kid bitten by an atomic spider who becomes a teenage superhero? According to the mavens at Marvel Comics, quite a lot. They think there's no end to the ways they can milk this cow.
Here, after Sony and Marvel signed a joint rights deal two years ago, Spider-Man teams up with Tony Stark (Robert Downey Junior) as an apprentice member of The Avengers. To be accurate, Holland also did that last year when he made his debut as the new Spidey in Captain America: Civil War with all the rest of the gang – but that was a warm-up.
This new episode in the franchise-that-never-dies will presumably offer another couple of movies before the spider bites another kid and then we go round all over again.
People keep asking me if it's any good, but I don't know what to say. Yes, in its own terms: it's funny, and a couple of the big action sequences have tension as well as spectacle; yes, Holland is an appealing new presence in the red and blue suit, paired this time in mortal combat with Michael Keaton, playing a New York City contractor who turns to the dark side, inventing a set of huge mechanical wings with which to fly around and do bad things. I guess no one wanted to call it Spider-Man versus Birdman-who-was-once-Batman, although Keaton looks like he just moved from one bird movie to another.
The wider problem is those "own terms". There's no real incentive towards originality or invention – except in the narrowest sense – in these monster franchises.
The fans don't want originality; quite the opposite. They want the familiar characters of childhood to keep doing the things they loved as kids, and that billion-dollar straitjacket stifles any real creativity – not just in this series but in all of them, from Star Wars to The Avengers and all the other superheroes in between.
The best one can hope for now in any of these movies is a glimmer of humanity in the story. The rest will be big, shiny, metallic and full of brain-numbingly vacuous action.
On that level, Holland's Spider-Man does bring us closer to earth.
Peter Parker is still a kid here – a 15-year-old in high school in New York, with Marisa Tomei as his guardian, Aunt May. Peter is already bitten; already aware of his powers.
Stark has built him a very powerful suit full of gizmos, but he's not allowed to use them. He desperately wants to join the big boys and girls in The Avengers. Stark thinks he's not ready, so Peter disobeys him and learns some hard lessons. In that sense, there is a human story here, but it's bare bones as drama.
On another level, being a kid makes Peter slightly less interesting than his predecessors, and that's no criticism of Holland. Both Maguire and Garfield had more to play.
There's less weight in this Peter Parker. He's more like Spider-Boy than Spider-Man, with a boy's emotions. That adds a little sugar to the mixture as Peter swoons over his school crush, played by Laura Harrier, but no more depth.
For the fans, none of this will matter.
They want the thrill of nostalgia, the familiarity of revisiting the hero whose pyjamas they once wore – and it seems they want it again and again.
That's a powerful and sacred memory way beyond any critical perspective, which is just where Marvel and Sony want it to be. They will happily exploit those memories till the (cash) cows come home.
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