Definitive Spiderman is the best Marvel of the year

Rating: 7/10 (10 July 2017)

Spiderman:Homecoming is the first film with Peter Parker as a fully- fledged member of the MCU.
Peter Parker, plucked from obscurity in Queens to assist 'Team Stark' in the Civil War, finds himself sidelined. Told to stand up for the little guy, our erstwhile superhero finds himself directing lost old ladies and beating up muggers, all the while feeling that he could do more. Overconfident as a superhero, he is the polar opposite at high school where he is the champion of the quiz team and shyly attracted to Liz. After Spiderman foils a bank robbery which is performed with some slightly outlandish weaponry, our hero begins to track the source of the weapons, which leads back to Adrian Toomes, a contractor who is bitter for being kicked off the lucrative Chitari cleanup contracts and lost a lot of money. Toomes now uses an elaborate flying suit and chitari technology to steal alien artefacts to continue his profitable weapon sales operation.
Tom Holland as Peter Parker is quite excellent in the role. For the first time in any Spiderman film, we have a teenage Spiderman and the film does very well in making us feel that this guy is just a kid, and a somewhat weedy one at that. Looking small and uncomfortable whenever he is at school (yet curiously buff when stripping in and out of his outfit), he is frequently shown in long shot or against massive backdrops to highlight just how out of his depth he is in this world of superheroes. Charming, enthusiastic, hubristic, and flawed, Holland's Spiderman is a triumph of character and actor combining to produce a winning cinematic creation. In a Marvel film so often there is little sense of peril, but here we become genuinely concerned for Peter. We fear for his safety several times. It's great.
As a foil to Spiderman we have the ever-wonderful Michael Keaton as Adrian Toomes, aka Vulture. A disaffected American worker, he's the embodiment of the American Dream laid low by big corporations stealing the contracts for themselves. At one point Keaton growls that "the guys who created this mess now get paid to clean it up". It's hard not to sympathise with him, and Keaton's superb performance really sells this villain as a believable creation. So long a weak point in Marvel movies, Toombs is one of the best villains the franchise has created; threatening, charming, understandable, sympathetic, psychotic, and motivated.
The rest of the cast are fine, though the constant reappearances of Tony Stark starts to grate. I found myself yearning for a charismatic older actor playing the Uncle Ben/father figure role. Stark is a dick, and it is hard to see him giving life-lessons to a kid when he basically created the whole situation in the first place.
You'll be pleased to know that the action sequences are all very good indeed, a sequence on the Washington Monument being a standout (and in 3D this really delivers). Whenever Spiderman is taking on multiple opponents with a flurry of web shots, punches, kicks, flips, wall hangs and sarcastic commentary from the snarky kid in red and blue it is brilliantly entertaining.
There are problems, however. Firstly there film feels quite flat. Moments that are clearly meant to be humorous don't deliver. Likewise some of the action sequences seem a bit rote, like something you'd see in Agents of SHIELD rather than a mega-budget movie. There is also un- necessary sub-scenes and nods that didn't quite fit with the characters, or the story, or the tone of the film.
The other major problem with the film is the existence of Kick-Ass. Michael Vaughan's film clearly owes a great debt to Spiderman, but watching Homecoming it is hard to shake the feeling of deja vu, especially when you see Spiderman walking around the neighbourhood using his powers on low- level muggers. Both films create believable teenagers, give them superpowers, have them get bored and listless, then have them get out of their depth before eventually triumphing.
Unfortunately, due to the unimaginative direction mentioned above, Kick-Ass is a superior film. The slight dips that Homecoming suffers from (the nerdy best friend irritating, the love interest bland, the humour flat, some of the action cheap, and plot twists are visible a mile away) Kick-Ass doesn't.
However I fully understand that this is the film that Spiderman fans have been waiting for, and it is as slick and enjoyable a film as Marvel has ever made. It is the first time Spiderman is seen as he should be: as a kid. The film is very good, the best Marvel of the year, but this reviewer enjoyed Wonder Woman more; it was also energetic, propulsive, colourful, lively and tear- jerkingly heroic. Homecoming doesn't quite engage the same emotions in this reviewer.