In the past 15 years, no fewer than seven movies have featured the character of Peter Parker, the Queens teenager who obtains powers from a radioactive spider bite. Tobey Maguire starred in three of them from 2002 to 2007; Andrew Garfield starred in two from 2012 to 2014; and after appearing in a couple of dazzling scenes in last year’s Captain America: Civil War, Tom Holland now takes center stage in Spider-Man: Homecoming. If the superhero genre is the dominant Hollywood trend of this century, the Spider-Man pictures are largely responsible—and along with the nine films in the X-Men universe, constitute the form’s most significant subgenre.
The only unambiguously good movie out of the first six was Spider-Man 2, which manages to be funny and touching as it details the difficulties Parker faces as a poor young man just out of college trying to maintain a romantic relationship and hold down a job and eke out a living when he feels like he must be on call 24-7 to save ordinary people from the bad guys. A record of achievement that low shouldn’t have generated so many pictures. But then the Spider-Man subgenre exists primarily because of the peculiarities of the deal that secured Sony Pictures the rights to the character of Spider-Man.
After the dreadful Spider-Man 3 was released in 2007, Maguire and director Sam Raimi asserted they would not simply make another stinker but would only do No. 4 if they could come up with something good and new. They couldn’t. Meanwhile, the studio that owned the rights to the character was required by contract to make a new Spider-Man picture by 2012 or watch helplessly as the character reverted to the control of Marvel—the comic-book company that had created Spider-Man and, with the release of Iron Man in 2008, had quickly become the most powerful brand in Hollywood.
So, in an astonishingly unimaginative move, Sony Pictures simply remade the original Spider-Man a decade after the first, with Garfield getting bitten by the spider just as Maguire was and learning how to use his powers just as Maguire did. It was lousy, and the sequel was even worse. As Richard Rushfield writes in his invaluable Ankler column, “It was the lowest-grossing of the five films, and after five Spideys in 11 years it was clear that audiences were exhausted. . . . The disaster couldn’t have come at a worse time. 2014 will go down in history as the year of the Sony hack, i.e., the worst chaos inflicted on a film studio in history. It was also the year that Sony failed to have a single film in the top 10 box-office grossers.”
At this point, something somewhat miraculous happened. The visionary head of Marvel Studios, Kevin Feige, went to Sony and negotiated an incredibly complicated deal in which Marvel—which is owned by Disney, a Sony competitor—would take creative control of the character and basically make the new Spider-Man movie for its rival. Moreover, it would reintroduce Spider-Man and the new actor playing him, Tom Holland, in one of its blockbuster Avengers movies a year before the release of the new Marvel-Sony collaboration.
That reintroduction, undertaken in a scene in which Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man recruits the teenager whose powers he’s seen on YouTube, was the unquestioned highlight of Captain America: Civil War. And now there’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, which isn’t the equal of Spider-Man 2 but is leagues better than any of the others.
The key to the Marvel movies is the casting. Feige and his colleagues are extraordinarily good at it, as they proved in 2008 when they resuscitated Downey’s career by handing him the lead in Iron Man. And they just kept going, with the delightful Chris Hemsworth assaying the clueless god Thor, the terrific Chris Evans finding both the comedy and humanity in Captain America, and (most impressively) Chris Pratt’s out-of-nowhere killer turn in Guardians of the Galaxy. Tom Holland’s Spider-Man was another astoundingly inspired choice. He looks, moves, acts, and sounds like an overeager, overexcited, and understandably foolish kid only recently emerged from puberty. He combines gawky adolescence with remarkable physical command.
Spider-Man: Homecoming works because it’s a movie about a high-school kid. Peter may have freakish abilities and scientific genius, but he’s still 15 years old. His judgment is problematic, his wisdom is in question, and his good heart is at war with the inevitable grandiosity that would afflict anyone able to do what he can do. He’s a superhero screw-up, and as a result, an entirely lovable one. The movie’s primary villain is equally down-to-earth: a contractor played by the wonderful Michael Keaton, who’s pushed out of a good city job cleaning up after the Avengers and becomes a black-market distributor of alien weapons.
There’s a moment after a clash between the two of them when Peter finds himself weak and trapped and alone—and he bursts into tears. It’s the most emotionally resonant moment in any of the Marvel movies. That may not be saying all that much, but it’s not nothing.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic.
