Iron Man is a Villain – Spider-Man: Homecoming

Iron Man?  Iron Man is a damn villain.  The bad guy in Spider-Man: Homecoming only broke bad after Stark used his political influence to screw him out of a city contract.  Peter Parker is basically motivated by the fact that Stark trusts him to fight the good guys but not to fight the bad guys.  Or just doesn’t care.  I would say he delegated overseeing Spider-Man to an incompetent underling, but there is no indication he gave any actual direction to do any actual oversight.  Stark used Spider-Man and then tried to forget about him.  Oh, and that Reason You Suck speak he gives Parker two-thirds of the way through the movie?  All bull.  He even tries to pat himself on the back for recruiting a 14-year-old to fight Captain America!

Now that I have that off my chest, Spider-Man: Homecoming is a very good superhero movie, a damn fine high school movie, and, uh, not quite exactly a Spider-Man movie.

Spider-Man: Homecoming does finally answer the age-old question: what if Spider-Man needed to get somewhere but he was in the suburbs?

Homecoming does a lot of things right.  It’s funny.  It keeps the right tone.  It’s unabashed about heroism.  There is one great twist.  The action scenes don’t bog down into a series of inconsequential CGI explosions.  There is only one bad guy!  (Keaton turns in a pitch perfect performance.)  No origin story!  This is Spider-Man’s seventh movie in the last fifteen years.  We know who he is and what he can do.

Homecoming gets a lot of mileage out of keeping Spidey away from skyscrapers.  It’s cool!  And, uh, a bit much.  The originally trilogy was pretty much a love letter to NYC.  Kinda Spidey’s thing!  Keeping him away from skyscrapers entirely is a mistake.  This comes back to the whole “not quite exactly a Spider-Man movie” thing.

I’m still a little bitter that they didn’t stick it out and make a fourth Spider-Man movie with Tobey Maguire.  I want an adult Spider-Man stuck in a troubled marriage with Mary Jane, damnit!  But I won’t complaint, because Homecoming is one of my top-five all-time superhero movies.