Spider-Man Homecoming Movie Review

Article by Gabe Zia

Lazy Film Critic Movie Reviews

Spider-Man: Homecoming

Nearly 10 years and 16 movies into the MCU, you would think a series like this would grow stale and repetitive after a while. Typically, each new MCU movie has had to do something very outside the norm even in context to the rest of the films to keep it fresh and make every movie feel new rather than formulaic and boring. And this kind of puts Homecoming in a tight spot, being a pretty simplistic Superhero movie amongst all of these movies that do all these things to set themselves apart. So you can count me as pretty damn surprised that I enjoyed the living hell out of Spider-Man Homecoming.

Usually I'm pretty good about containing fanboy hype and trying to be objective in my reviews, but I'm not going to sugarcoat it, this movie had me with a dumb looking grin on my face for its entire two hour running time. For me, Spider-Man is probably up there as one of my favorites of all-time, and a big factor in that is that at the end of the day Peter Parker isn't a moody teenager (or an adult like batman with the personality of a moody teenager) sulking about some tragic backstory while he angsts his way through truckloads of nameless goons. Really at the day he's just a kid, an idealist kid who's been given superpowers and does the only thing he thinks he should, becomes a Superhero. And despite how well the Raimi trilogy portrayed Spider-Man, if I'm being honest this really felt like the first Spider-Man film to capture this part of the character, going beyond the fun goofy antics of a snarky wise ass in a mask and showing a real three dimensional character, one trying to balance his real life and his alter ego. This is one of the big things that I feel like most Superhero movies enormously fail to tap into, either with DC's approach where it mostly ignores this aspect and does it all off camera, or the MCU approach which has typically been to cut out the middle man and have most of the heroes not even have a secret identity. And not only does this film more than cover this aspect of the character, but Tom Holland performs excellently with it. The duality of his character really comes through with Tom Hollands portrayals of both Spider-Man and Peter Parker, and to the guys credit this is a really hard thing to do as an actor, which is probably why most comic book movies just don't do it that much. 

One other performance I really didn't expect to love from this film was Michael Keaton as the villain, or really I should say I didn't expect to care about the villains at all. Marvels villains in the past have ranged from pretty okay to total garbage, the MCU has been really great but typically the villains have been the weakest link. Not only is Michael Keaton as the Vulture a major exception to this but he's also arguably the MCU's best villain yet, a compelling, interesting, and complicated villain who is surprisingly in a kind of moral grey area as opposed to the usual comic book villain pure diabolical evil. I won't spoil the context but there's a few moments where his character is put on the spot to kind of explain why he's doing what he's doing, and it's one of the best scenes in the movie. When it comes to it his motivations are pretty sound and one could even argue that most people wouldn't do any different in that situation. That sort of complexity is incredibly rare in a villain, let alone a comic book movie villain, so it was a breath of fresh air for me. Not to mention, he's also an intimidating and well characterized villain with a command of each scene he's in, which is always a welcome sight.

One of the absolute best parts of this movie is the way it handles the larger MCU. If you ask me, this has been something most films in the MCU (and arguably most cinematic universes) have struggled with, and to be fair it's a really hard balance to strike. For some films, like Civil War or Age of Ultron, the film gets much too caught up in its own lore that it forgets to tell its own story rather than setting up for the next one. And as much as I would prefer movies to exist functionally on their own, some MCU movies don't involve the lore as much as they really should (such as Iron Man 3, Thor The Dark World and one could argue Doctor Strange). However, Homecoming I found strikes that balance that only stuff like The Winter Soldier and a few others have landed. The larger MCU is incorporated into the plot, heavily enough for the film to believably exist within the lore, but on it's own Homecoming works perfectly well as its own film.

Final Rating
I'm glad I took a week after seeing this one to really mull it over and make up my mind on whether or not my love of this movie was genuine or fanboy hype corrupting my opinion. And I'm glad to say that after seeing it a second time, I actually came to like this movie more than I already did. Spider-Man Homecoming joins Raw and Get Out as my absolute favorite films of 2017 thus far.