What’s it about?
Peter Parker juggles life as a teenager and wannabe Avenger. What could go wrong?
What did we think?
Anthony Sherratt says: With great reboot comes great responsibility. So it’s quite a relief that this Marvel-Sony hybrid has successfully returned Spiderman to the MCU in a romp typical of that universe. Thankfully they left out the almost obligatory origin story (no offence Uncle Ben but we’ve seen you enough) and chose to utilise the traditional theme song (taking note Snyder/Nolan?). Sprinkle with well-written characters and a truly impressive performance from Michael Keaton and this reboot truly hits all the marks. Tom Holland captures teenage life well without becoming angsty, RDJ is simply RDJ and the action is just great fun. The only minor grumble is the AI that makes the spider suit more like Iron Man but amidst more than two hours of genuinely funny action, that’s a bit of a nitpick.
It’s so great to see Spider-Man doing all the dumb shit teenagers actually do. He’s awkward, a little hopeless, determined, enthusiastic and stubborn. It’s exactly how I always imagined giving superpowers to a teenager would go down.
It was also excellent to see Keaton playing Batman… I mean Birdman… I mean The Vulture. Art imitates art imitating life imitating art (or something). Solid 4 stars from me too.
It’s a fun romp – Tom Holland was born to play Spider-Man, Keaton now has covered all bases regarding superheroes (the dark of the light side and the light of the dark) – the best scene of the movie is the discussion these two have in the car. Which shows it’s not the special effects that make a movie great. More quality script would have lifted it from popcorn movie to must-see movie.
3½ stars