by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our “feature” last night was Spider-Man: Homecoming, the sixth big-budget Spider-Man feature from
Columbia since the first one in 2002 and the third “boot” of the franchise. The
first cycle featured Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man and Sam Raimi as director, and
lasted for three films; the second, called The Amazing Spider-Man (the official title of the comic magazine) featured
Andrew Garfield as Spider-Man and Marc Webb as director, lasted for two. This
version stars British actor Tom Holland as Spider-Man (he speaks credible
American English in the film itself but his real-life British accent is very
noticeable in the promotional clip that precedes the feature on Blu-Ray disc) —
he’s 21 but he plays the character as 15, a couple of years younger than the
previous Spider-Men at an age where those two years matter. The director is Jon
Watts and the script is committee-written: Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis
Daley are credited with the original screen story and share credit with a
plethora of other writers — Jon Watts, Christopher Ford, Chris McKenna and Erik
Sommers — for the actual script. Charles and I were somewhat back of scratch on
this one because it’s actually a direct sequel to the last Marvel Avengers movie, and we haven’t been following the Avengers films; we’re told that the 15-year-old Spider-Man
has just returned from an Avengers conference in Berlin and is sort of in
Avengers pledge status and desperately pleading with the group’s chair, Tony
Stark a.k.a. Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr., looking awfully tired of the role by
now), to get admitted to full Avengers status. He returns home to New York
City, where he lives with his aunt May Parker (Marisa Tomei) — for once drawn
not as a wizened old woman but as someone still surprisingly sexy (there’s a hint
that one of Peter Parker’s a.k.a. Spider-Man’s friends is attracted to her
sexually, and I wish Watts and the writing committee had made a bit more of
that!) — and attends the Midtown School of Science and Technology.
He’s also
dropped most of his extracurricular activities because of the time demands of
his internship with Tony Stark — the cover for his superhero training — though
he’s still in the academic decathlon team and they’ve qualified for the
national finals in Washington, D.C. The bad guys in this one get introduced
before the good guys: they’re a bunch of proletarians who work for a salvage
contractor, Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton, almost unrecognizable as the same
actor who played Batman nearly 30 years ago — was it really that long? — and is therefore one of the few actors who’s
had major roles in both DC and
Marvel films), who in the opening scene is booted off a salvage site by a
hard-edged middle-aged blonde woman who announces that she’s there representing
the federal government, they’re taking over the site and the private
contractors who thought they had a deal with the city to keep anything they
salvaged from it are out of luck. Toomes pleads that he just bought a whole
bunch of new trucks and hired a large crew, and he’ll have to fire them all and
go bankrupt himself if he loses the contract. It’s hard not to feel for him,
but his response is to take the alien technology he’s already salvaged from the
site and go into business for himself, selling super-weapons based on it to
criminals — including a gang of bank robbers who disguise themselves as The
Avengers. Maybe any more
conventionally structured superhero film would have been a disappointment after
Wonder Woman, which wasn’t a
great film but was certainly a work of quality within a pretty disreputable genre, but Spider-Man: Homecoming just seemed to me to lurch from crisis to crisis,
with not particularly interesting action scenes and an awful lot of footage
devoted to Peter Parker and his interactions with his high-school classmates.
Though it didn’t go as far in that direction as the Raimi cycle did — in Spider-Man
2, in particular, Peter Parker’s non-hero
life was depicted as such a succession of failures and traumas I joked that
they could have called it It’s a Wonderful Life, Spider-Man — Spider-Man: Homecoming seemed to devote way too much time to Peter Parker
and not enough to Spider-Man.
The most interesting conflict the writing
committee came up with — and one which could have given them a film that in its
own way would have been as powerful and as different from the normal run of the
superhero genre as Wonder
Woman — was that between Peter Parker and
his surrogate father, Tony Stark, who gives him all this cool electronic gear
(including a super-version of the Spider-Man costume that has an
auto-attendant, “Karen,” who speaks to him in the sort of patronizing female
voice of the real Siri from Apple and Alexa from Amazon.com) but puts “training
wheels” on it, deliberately limiting the capabilities Parker can use until
Start thinks he’s ready for him. The love-hate relationship between the orphan
Parker and his surrogate father Stark is considerably more interesting than the
petty intrigues between Parker and his classmates, including the half-Black
girl Michelle (Zendaya) who becomes his sort-of girlfriend — only he’s always
running out on their dates to go after one criminal or another (can you say
“Superman and Lois Lane”?), and at the end, in what the writing committee
obviously intended as a shock, turns out to be the daughter of Andrew Toomes,
the big villain Spider-Man has been after all movie since he’s used his access
to alien technology to build himself a set of artificial wings (actually a
turbo-powered aircraft) and become the flying super-villain “Vulture.” Oddly, Charles
liked Spider-Man: Homecoming
better than I did — not our usual reaction to a superhero movie — and I suspect
because he responded more than I did to the clear modeling of the high-school
sequences on John Hughes’ 1980’s films. This was deliberate: imdb.com’s
“Trivia” contributors noted that director Watts showed Hughes’ films to his
cast members to show them how he wanted them to play high-school students (and
a clip from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
appears in the film), and Charles said Spider-Man: Homecoming was what would have resulted if John Hughes had ever
written and directed a superhero movie.
The film as a whole disappointed me,
though there’s a nice coming-from-behind ending in which Spider-Man has to take
on Vulture and his crew in what looks like an old pair of red and blue pajamas
(let’s face it, there are Spider-Man trick-or-treat costumes that look more
convincing than this!), because Tony Stark has taken away his super-suit
because, as he explains, “If you’re nothing without the suit, then you
shouldn’t have it.” At the end Spider-Man: Homecoming takes on the air of a classic coming-of-age tale in
which the boy hero has to prove he’s become worthy of adult tasks and
acceptance into the inner circle — though it ends rather peculiarly with Parker
putting his Avenger ambitions on hold and staying “your friendly neighborhood
Spider-Man.” (Gwyneth Paltrow makes a cameo appearance in the final scene as
Pepper Potts, her usual part as Iron Man’s girlfriend in the sequence of Iron
Man and Avengers movies.) Spider-Man: Homecoming is clever and engaging, though it also had the
makings of a far finer and more complex film than it is — and I think part of
the problem is that Columbia Pictures and Marvel Studios are too committed to
keeping Spider-Man a teenager and putting him through all the tired paces of
adolescent angst instead of
letting him grow up. (I suspect that’s part of the reason they’ve done two reboots of the franchise: they keep having to bring
in younger Spider-Men as the older ones “age out” of their conception of the
character.) Among the promos at the front of the disc is an ad for a Spider-Man
video game whose writers decided to make him 23 and already a veteran of the
superhero biz for several years — and I wish the producers of the Spider-Man
movies would use that conception
of the character instead of keeping him in high school and, if anything, making
him younger in each incarnation
(in the Amazing Spider-Man cycle
he was at least a high-school senior and one of the issues in his life was
facing college; in this one he’s 15 and back to being a sophomore!).
