The best Spiderman movie since the Maguire movie-- but with some criticisms.

Rating: 5/10 (11 July 2017)

This is the best Spiderman movie since the original with Tobey Maguire back in the early 2000's (God do I feel old.) It has the right balance of action, melodrama and romance. That's where the Andrew Garfield Spiderman movies failed, I think: the balance was way, way off. We had much too much of Peter Parking mooning over Gwen Stacey and not enough Spiderman, Electro, and Lizard in those: and it's a shame we won't have a sequel to Garfield's Spiderman, because the third movie looked like they were building to the Sinister Six.
Spiderman is better than all the other Marvel and X-Men movies because it doesn't take itself too seriously and does not fall completely in the mould that every single other Marvel movie falls into: Thor is dumb and dry, Antman is dumb and dry, Captain America, Holy Cheese, don't get me started: are those movies ever dumb, dry, and forgettable.
Spiderman, on the other hand, has vibrancy. New York, the people of New York, the characters and even most of the jokes are all as colourful as Spiderman's red and blue suit. The young man playing Spiderman deserves praise, as does his chubby friend, as does Marissa Tomei, but especially Micheal Keaton. I really liked Keaton in this: Keaton is a powerhouse actor and I really hope to see more of him in this role as the Vulture.
Some criticisms, though. First, there's a line where a student says to a teacher that he's been attending protests, to which the teacher says, "That's good, you're a good American, attending protests." While this is true (protests helped end the war in Vietnam) the only protests in the news lately have been the Antifa protests, the Black Lives Matter protests, and Anti-Trump protests: and the first two stem from the third. BLM is nothing like the Selma to Montgomery marches and has been criticized endlessly: MLK, a wonderful, peaceful leader, protested by praying in public while wearing his church clothes. The protesters of BLM meanwhile dress in masks and gang clothing and have engaged in looting and destruction. Plus the less said about Antifa (look up "students larping as revolutionaries" and people like Eric Clanton at Berkeley) the better.
Another criticism: there's a scene where the students go to the Washington Monument and one student, Michelle (who is dark-skinned), refuses to enter, saying that she won't go into a building built by slaves. Her teacher, a white man, tells her that, "Oh, I'm pretty sure the monument wasn't built by slaves," to which a security guard (also dark-skinned) looks at him and makes a gesture that says, "Eh, maybe, dude: and be careful." Then we see the teacher become flustered and then literally back away from the two.
A few things about this. Why are the white people in this movie either villains (Vulture) or ignorant clowns (the teacher)? The actors playing Captain American and Iron Man are both present as cameos, but all the other white people are villains or idiots (Spiderman is part Italian, by the way). While slavery is a horrible blotch on American history, I don't think that denigrating another race is any way to make up for it. Additionally, the idea that the Washington Monument was built by slaves is dubious (John Steele Gordon, author of "Washington's Monument and the Fascinating History of the Obelisk" doubts the monument was built by slaves), so, if the history is dubious, why even bring it up? If the history behind it is dubious but we have a blockbuster movie claiming it's fact, then millions of moviegoers will leave thinking it's fact: just as we've had news reports claiming that Trump, during his first days in office, removed a bust of MLK, which turned out to be a lie. But most people now think it's true because it was in the news for a week.
Hey: America's problem isn't racism, but classism. You know leftist propaganda has you when you're paying money to go to the movies and hear lines like these.