Spider-Man: Homecoming Summary & Review
For every teenager, high school is something that is hard to deal with. Handling the stress of their schoolwork, along with after school activities, young crushes, and everyday social tasks, it can be a very stressful time for them. But for Peter Parker, he has to deal with high school while balancing life as New York’s neighborhood superhero, Spider-Man. Now he is faced with his biggest challenge yet in Spider-Man: Homecoming.
In the second reboot to the Spider-Man series, and the sixteenth film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, we rejoin Peter Parker (Tom Holland) following the events of Captain America: Civil War. Two months after his mission with the Avengers, Peter tries to get through high school, while also tackling life as a local superhero and trying to impress Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.). However, when he discovers a plot to sell alien tech to criminals, headed by Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton), he decides to wants to do more. Though Stark wants him to “stay close to the ground,” Peter knows he is the only person who can stop Toomes.
I really enjoyed Holland’s portrayal of Spider-Man in Civil War. I liked that they got someone who really looked like a high school student. He really captured the child-like personality of the character. Unfortunately, while he continues to shine, the movie as a whole wasn’t the same. Spider-Man: Homecoming was slightly entertaining, but collapses from everything that is wrong with superhero movies these days.
First off, like I said, I did enjoy Tom Holland. I thought he did a great job of portraying Peter Parker, both as a regular high school kid and as a superhero. He keeps the movie going with a good sense of charm. Also, being a fan of Michael Keaton, I was really happy that he was in this movie. I liked seeing an actor that I know from prestige films do something fun in a superhero movie.
Unfortunately, as someone who is not a fan of superhero movies, this one, like many others, ended up just being mediocre. While the action was better than most other Marvel films, it was once again unimpressive. All of the action scenes were overly long and predictable. After seeing so many of the Marvel movies, the action scenes were almost identical to others, which meant it wasn’t surprising or entertaining.
To me, this wasn’t a Spider-Man movie. With so much of the movie devoted to other characters from the MCU, this movie really should be called Avenger 16. The movie didn’t know whether or not it wanted to be about Spider-Man or the Avengers (I had a similar feeling about Civil War). I would have preferred a movie that was solely dedicated to Spider-Man, and didn’t waste so much time cramming in elements from the rest of the MCU.
Aside from Holland and Keaton, I didn’t care for the performances. Downey Jr. was just playing the same character as before, and there was too little of him for any kind of development in Stark. Also, I was very disappointed in Zendaya. All she did was be in the background and act weird. She wasn’t a real ally and had no real reason for being in this movie. She could have been completely cut out from the film, and it wouldn’t be any different.
My biggest problem with this movie was its inability to stand out from all the other films in the series. The reason I loved Ant-Man, Deadpool, and Logan so much was because they weren’t like other superhero movies. They tried to be different from all the others. This movie makes no effort to stand out from the rest of the MCU, and ends up feeling derivative. I can’t be entertained by a movie that feels like something we’ve seen so many times before.
I would say I was disappointed by Spider-Man: Homecoming, but at this point, it’s what I expect from these movies. I expect them to be mediocre films that don’t try to reinvent the genre. They just feel like every other superhero movie made by the studio. I don’t even get why they have different directors. It just ends up in the hands of the studio, where they turn what could have been a great movie into everything we’ve seen before. I hope someone, one day, can produce a Marvel movie that feels different, but I don’t see a bright future for this extremely average franchise.
