Spider-Man: Homecoming

The Gravity of Queens

Movies that threaten the end of the world tend to lose me a little. Once the danger gets that big, it stops feeling like danger and starts feeling like wallpaper. *Spider-Man: Homecoming* is smart enough to scale everything way down. Instead of saving existence, Peter Parker is mostly trying to impress a billionaire who won't return his texts and survive being sixteen. That smaller frame gives the whole Marvel machine a pulse.

There's no impending apocalypse here. There's just a kid trying to impress a billionaire who won't return his texts, and a blue-collar contractor trying to keep his salvage business afloat.



Jon Watts, coming off the lean indie thriller *Cop Car*, understood exactly what this third iteration of Spider-Man needed. We didn't need to watch Uncle Ben die again. We didn't need the spider bite. We needed hallway embarrassment and acne. USA Today’s Brian Truitt had it right when he wrote that the film "belongs more to the John Hughes cinematic universe than the Avengers." The high-school material isn't dead air between action beats. It's the point.

Tom Holland is the first live-action Peter who really seems to exist at actual teen scale. Tobey Maguire played him like a solemn grown man trapped in homeroom. Andrew Garfield looked too much like a catalog model to pass as overlooked. Holland plays Peter like a hyperactive golden retriever with caffeine in his bloodstream. Even in costume, he never settles into classical hero poses. He bounces, hunches, fidgets, and radiates the need for approval.

He's basically a kid in a very expensive dress-up kit Tony Stark handed him, and the movie is sharp enough to know how odd that arrangement actually is.



Then Michael Keaton shows up as Adrian Toomes and quietly takes over. Marvel villains often arrive yelling about destiny or chaos or whatever the abstraction of the week is. Toomes is better than that. Keaton gives him a bruised, exhausted grievance. He's a blue-collar guy who got screwed over by the elite class—specifically Stark's damage control crew—and decided to skim a little off the top to feed his family. After decades of playing literal and metaphorical winged creatures in *Batman* and *Birdman*, it's funny and fitting to watch Keaton wear the Vulture's flight jacket, but what matters is how little he pushes. He barely needs to.

He doesn't play Toomes as a megalomaniac. He plays him like a tired dad who has worked a double shift and is completely out of patience for this kid in red tights breaking his stuff.

The film's best scene is also the simplest. No collapsing tower, no portal, no laser. Just a car ride.



Peter goes to Liz's house for homecoming, the door opens, and her father turns out to be Toomes. Watts then locks us in the backseat of his sedan as Toomes drives both kids to the dance and slowly, horribly solves the equation. Keaton barely moves. His eyes keep catching Peter in the rearview mirror while stoplight colors wash his face in green and then red. When the realization lands, he never raises his voice. He just turns, goes calm, and explains that if Peter interferes again, he will kill him and everyone he cares about.

That moment works because it isn't abstract. It's not an alien warlord threatening the planet. It's your girlfriend's dad threatening you in a parking lot.

If you want a cosmic comic-book spectacle, the movie can look a little thin. Some of the action leans so hard on CGI it starts to resemble a glossy game cutscene. But the emotional core stays intact. *Homecoming* strips Spider-Man back to his most durable truth: he isn't great because he can catch a flying car. He's great because he still has to finish his Spanish homework after he does it.