Spider-Man: Homecoming

Spider-Man returns in yet another iteration of Stan Lee’s most famous character, with the MCU-set storyline following Peter Parker (Tom Holland) as he attempts to balance a seemingly average high-school existence with continuing efforts at fighting crime in the guise of his heroic alter ego. There’s certainly a lot worth enjoying and admiring within Spider-Man: Homecoming – the movie, armed with impressively strong performances, is unquestionably a substantial improvement over the pitiful The Amazing Spider-Man – and yet the film never quite manages to reach the plentiful highs attained by Sam Raimi’s original trilogy. (Even the much-maligned third installment, Spider-Man 3, ultimately fares better.) It’s clear, eventually, that the egregiously padded-out running time of 133 minutes plays an instrumental role in the film’s somewhat disappointing vibe, as filmmaker Jon Watts, working from a screenplay by six (!) credited writers, delivers an almost episodic narrative that’s been crammed with a series of entertainingly larger-than-life set pieces – including over-the-top action sequences set on the Washington Monument and New York’s Staten Island Ferry. But that absence of a concrete throughline prevents Spider-Man: Homecoming from wholeheartedly becoming the engrossing adventure one might’ve anticipated, with the film ultimately able to transcend its blandly watchable atmosphere on only a small handful of occasions. (The movie’s high-water-mark is an absolutely riveting confrontation between Holland and Keaton’s respective characters.) It’s clear, too, that the predictably loud and special-effects heavy climax ensures the picture concludes on a fairly lackluster note, and it is, in the end, impossible to label Spider-Man: Homecoming as much more than a slightly above-average yet far-from-stellar Marvel production.

**1/2 out of ****