Friday, November 10, 2017

Spider-Man: Homecoming (Columbia Pictures, Marvel Studio, Pascal Pictures, 2017)

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-ManSpider-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!).