REVIEW BY ERIC LORTIE
It’s nice when franchises have a pattern. That way you know what you’re getting yourself into. Every other Star Trek is good. The Batman pattern is based on how appropriate the actor is to playing the role of Bruce Wayne. Star Wars goes ‘Good’, ‘Great’, ‘Alright’, ‘aaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh and then I wake up in a dumpster smelling increasingly of bourbon’. And then ‘rainbows shoot into your eyeballs and the glorious future reveals itself once more’. You know. Patterns.
The Spiderman franchise has had a lot working against it. It’s been so erratic. There’s no pattern. People forget that it was Marvel’s first decent foray into modern comic movies. Before he was awful, Tobey McGuire was decent. Good, even, under the right light.
He isn’t now, because the movies didn’t age well and because Spiderman 3 was an abomination. But before we knew how good big budget Marvel movies could be, Spiderman gave us the promise of a bright and glorious future totally devoid of stupid dancing spidergoth scenes. It was a beautiful lie.
Andrew Garfield was a great dude who did a good job and sincerely loved being given the opportunity to play the character. We will speak no further of him because his level of nerdy passion can only die in hellish fire in Hollywood.
And that brings us to Spiderman Homecoming. Except that we were already here. Civil War was edited to include Spiderman in a big fight scene. And it was the right call. He added tremendously to that experience. It didn’t feel contrived. He fit the tone of the fight because he was genuinely, believably Spiderman.
Spiderman Homecoming is a continuation of that story. It is a genuine representation of Spiderman. It feels like a Spiderman movie. I didn’t know what that felt like until this past weekend.
Amazingly, it also feels like a Marvel movie. Maybe it’s because of all the MCU cameos. RDJ can’t ever be anyone but Tony Stark. Chris Evans’ random Captain America cameos are fantastic. Marvel has, for the moment, taken perfect control of its brand. This doesn’t feel like a Sony movie. If you were to show this to someone after Civil War they wouldn’t think it was made by Sony instead of Disney.
I’ve barely said anything about the content of the movie, and I won’t. Go see it. Go watch a great Spiderman movie with a good Spiderman actor and a decent Spiderman villain. Go laugh and enjoy excellent visuals and a couple solid, yet minor, plot twists. It has flaws but they pale in comparison to those of the previous movies. Also, spoiler alert: Uncle Ben doesn’t die. Thank goodness. They were going to cast Sean Bean in his role soon enough.
Spiderman Homecoming was good and entertaining. It won’t win an Oscar unless there’s an Oscar for Best Spiderman Movie, but it’s real easy to enjoy.
