SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING IS AS LIGHT AND POWERFUL AS SPIDEY'S WEB
YOU’D HAVE TO reach back into Marvel’s movie history to find a film quite as delightfully spry as Spider-Man: Homecoming—all the way back, in fact, to 2008’s Iron Man. That heartfelt romp not only fully rehabbed Robert Downey Jr.’s career, it also drafted a workable blueprint for the modern superhero flick, one that few entries have managed to follow. Nowadays, of course, Tony Stark is caught up in the globe-hopping skirmishes of the Avengers' saga, but in that first installment, he was just a semi-relatable, power-burdened weirdo trying to win over a girl and put away the bad guy; he came, he saw, he quipped fast. Later Marvel movies may have been weightier, but Iron Man’s light touch made it one of the best comic-book adaptations of its era.
Homecoming—which stars The Impossible’s Tom Holland as Peter Parker-slash-you-know-who, and was directed by Cop Car’s Jon Watts—maintains Iron Man’s breezy vibe by keeping the stakes (relatively) low, and by leaving out the cosmic McGuffins that have locked the Marvel movie universe in a state of constant convolution. Instead, it focuses largely on Parker’s attempt to adjust to his newfound powers while also wooing a classmate (Laura Harrier) and fending off an airborne villain named the Vulture (Michael Keaton). The world is still in danger in Homecoming, of course, but it’s hard to get too consumed about all that when you still don’t have a date for the homecoming dance.