Jon Watts’s reboot works best as a school comedy, with Tom Holland as a Peter Parker who is late for everything and Michael Keaton as a villain with a mortgage. The action gets murkier the higher it climbs, and Tony Stark keeps wandering in.
This is the third attempt at Spider-Man in fifteen years and the first made inside the Marvel machine, which is why Tony Stark keeps turning up. Jon Watts, whose previous film Cop Car got its tension from two small boys who did not understand what they had stolen, has been handed a fifteen-year-old with superpowers and a budget to match. Six writers share the screenplay credit and the film feels like it: a school comedy for an hour, a heist picture for twenty minutes and a Marvel film whenever somebody remembers. The school comedy is the good part. We enjoyed it, we would recommend it to anyone fond of the character or under seventeen, and we lost track of the last ten minutes of the action because the film did not let us see it.
Tom Holland is the reason the school scenes work. His Peter Parker is small, quick, late for everything and unable to stop talking, and Holland plays him as a boy far more frightened of Liz (Laura Harrier) than of anyone holding a gun. Ned (Jacob Batalon), who finds out the secret early and treats it as the best thing that has ever happened to him, gives Holland someone to babble at. Zendaya’s Michelle sits at the back of every room with a book and one dry line per scene. Watts shoots the corridors of Midtown School of Science and Technology the way American teen films have since the eighties, lockers and a decathlon team and a homecoming dance, and does not pretend to be doing anything cleverer.
Michael Keaton’s Adrian Toomes is the best thing in the film after Holland, and he is good because he is ordinary. He runs a salvage yard. He has a crew, a mortgage and a grievance against Stark, and Oliver Scholl’s production design gives him a hangar where alien hardware is stacked next to pallets and forklifts, so the wonders look like stock. Keaton barely raises his voice. There is a conversation in a car late on that we will not describe, in which he says nothing openly threatening, and we went cold; it was the calm, and the way he kept his eyes on the road.
Salvatore Totino shoots Queens in flat, ordinary daylight, and that is the right call: the suit looks like something a boy would be embarrassed to be caught in, and the neighbourhood has laundrettes and delis rather than backdrops. Louise Frogley’s costumes make the same point. Peter’s own outfit is a hoodie, tracksuit bottoms and goggles; the one Stark gives him is a piece of equipment, and the film is honest that it is also a leash. Michael Giacchino opens with a full orchestra playing the theme from the 1960s cartoon and sets the tone in twenty seconds. Dan Lebental and Debbie Berman cut the first scenes as Peter’s own phone footage, shaky and delighted, and it is the most confident editing in the film.
The trouble starts when it leaves the ground. Robert Downey Jr.’s Stark drops in to scold, and each time he does the film stops being about a boy in Queens and starts being about a franchise. Jon Favreau’s Happy Hogan, ignoring Peter’s texts, is funnier and does the same job. A sequence at the Washington Monument, with Ned and the decathlon team stuck in a lift, is built one beat at a time, and we sat forward through all of it because we could see exactly how far Peter had to climb and how little time he had. The climax is a fight in the dark against a man in a flying suit, and Lebental and Berman cut it so fast that we could not tell which figure was falling.
Against the character’s own record it sits below Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, which had a sadder hero and a clearer plot, and above the two Marc Webb films, which had neither. At 133 minutes it is longer than any school comedy needs to be. Most critics have been a shade warmer than we are, mostly because they forgave the last twenty minutes. Marisa Tomei’s May Parker is written largely as a joke about being attractive, and Liz is a girl to be looked at across a corridor; neither gets a scene in the first hour that is about her.
Watch it with a teenager if you have one to hand. They will not mind the plane, and you can enjoy the school day while they explain what a Chitauri is.
