Movie Review: Spider-Man Homecoming: No Pyramid Heads here.

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 After last weeks review of the newest hotness Baby Driver we follow that up with the first MCU staring movie for everybody's favorite New York wall crawler Peter Parker aka the Spectacular Spider-Man. Which only came about after Sony finally realized that if they were going to get anymore money out of the license they should probably let the people who actually created the character take care of it since at least for their movie universe they seem to know what they're doing. Yes, after the poorly received and short lived mess that was the Amazing Spider-Man franchise wound up more dead then Uncle Ben Sony finally allowed Marvel to at least partially reclaim Spidey's movie rights to introduce him into the MCU, first in Captain America Civil War and now properly integrate him with a proper Homecoming. 

 Now let me get this right out of the way Tom Holland (not that one who wrote the Tv miniseries version of The Langoliers) does a very good job as Peter Parker and Spider-Man managing to capture both the super intelligent budding science major and the annoying eager beaver teenager that manages to screw up just as much as he helps. Now initially this annoyed me as Peter tended to; as stated cause as much damage that he does manage to fix and him wanting to prove himself to Tony Stark was the main driving force of his impulsiveness but then again most teenagers like Peter do tend to do this so that makes this more tolerable. On top of that unlike characters like Wrong from Toqger, Leftovers from Ninninger or Dumbluck from Kyuuranger Peter actually acknowledges when he screws up, owns up to it and tries to fix his mistakes. Another point of hesitation for me is his modern day comic book incarnation where the writers want to keep writing him as a teenager even though he's been an adult for decades at this point!

 Though I may be talking out of my ass since I don't read comics I just see the movies and Linkara's show so I could very well be wrong in my statements and if so I apologize. Also yes Tom probably won't be replacing Toby McGuire in the popular consciousness anytime soon but I never completely liked Toby's portrayal (personally he does a better Peter Parker then Spider-Man) but hey whatever that's just me. Now enough of me blowing off steam let's discuss the movie itself and what I think this opens for the MCU.

 While it takes place in modern day (2017) we actually open right after the events of the first Avengers movie where a local salvage company and their leader Adrian Tombs played by Michael Keaton are in charge of clearing and excavating the debris from the Chitauri ships that were destroyed during the final fight. But they get kicked off the project by Tony Stark's and US Government backed Department of damage control so they start salvaging and reverse engineering the alien technology, re purposing it into weapons, thus becoming a group of high tech arms dealers, Tombs himself taking charge of his crew with a specially constructed flight apparatus that looks like a giant set of Vulture wings, what are the odds of that?

 Elsewhere after Civil War Peter is still hyped for his chance to play with the big boys but hears nothing from Tony so this mostly results to him pestering his handler Happy Hogan to surprisingly no results. All he hears from Tony is to just stay low and focus on local NYC stuff "you know, be your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man" helping old ladies cross the street, stop bank robberies, car jackers that kind of thing. But when he eventually comes across Vulture he naturally tries to stop him but is of course waaaay over his head and gets his ass handed to him by Tombs and his right hand man. So with his best buddy Ned, Peter has to figure out the Vulture's identity, stop whatever he's up to and prove his worth to Tony (even though Tony pretty clearly does trust him) and still have time to woo his crush Liz and persuade her to go with him to Homecoming, eh see what they did there?

 Now I won't give away anything more that happens but I will give my two cents. Overall this movie is about the most "ok" and down to earth for lack of a better term of the MCU movies I've seen, not fantastic not horrible just you know ok. There's no hint of any of the infinity gems, well duh Peter's going up against a group of arms dealers who scavenged alien tech not Hydra or something so in the over all scheme of the MCU this is rather low key but that's just fine, not every part of the MCU has to be a piece of the big puzzle. I mean if anything all this movie will contribute is that since they introduced a bunch of Spidey's bad guys and that alien weapon dealers business I'm guessing all that will happen is that the Netflix shows and Agents of Shield might have some new plot points to play around with.

 I mean that tech is still out there and not all of Tombs' crew were captured as far as I know so this plot point could introduce other baddies aside from Spider-Mans. And when those villains that were caught get out of Ryker's they could be recruited by the Kingpin which could lead to the Sinister Six. Apparently the Netflix shows could use something like Shocker, Rhino or the Tinkerer since apparently The Hand (which have been the background bad-guys in the Netflix shows) haven't been setting the world on fire, again haven't seen the Netflix shows but I have heard that The Hand and Iron Fist have been pretty damn bad so there you go. Or at the very least this plot point could be used to set up Spidey's sequel. Though there are some plot points that I do want to talk about but I'll save them for my end of the year roundup. So all in all this was a pretty ok movie, not amazing, nor horrible just middle of the road with some interesting plot points for some smart writer to take advantage of later. So when you get the chance catch up with the spectacular Spider-Man of the MCU.

Special thanks to my Patreon backer Jesse for his support.

Spider-Man: Homecoming is owned by Sony Pictures Releasing, Marvel Studios, Pascal Pictures and Colombia Pictures