Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) Review

Official trailer

The 7 is for a strong Phase Three MCU entry and the best Peter Parker since Tobey Maguire. Tom Holland plays Spider-Man as an actual teenager instead of an adult pretending to be young. Jon Watts’s direction draws on John Hughes-style high school filmmaking, and Michael Keaton’s Adrian Toomes is a better villain than this franchise usually bothers to write.

It also stands on its own, so nobody needs a homework list of twenty Marvel movies to follow it, and I give it real credit for that. The 7 is the right rating for a film that succeeds at what it attempts without reaching the franchise’s peak achievements.

For a guy who’s never cared about Spider-Man, this is the one I find myself defending. Keaton is the draw. A villain whose grievance is getting squeezed out by rich people has a point, and the film is smart enough to let him keep it.

The Setup

A prologue opens the film, showing Adrian Toomes operating a salvage company that’s been cleaning up alien technology from the Battle of New York (2012). His operation is shut down by a federal Department of Damage Control task force backed by Tony Stark’s resources. Toomes loses his business and watches his employees become unemployed while wealthy interests consolidate the alien-technology cleanup industry. He decides to retain some of the recovered alien technology and use it to develop weapons that he sells to criminals while building a personal Vulture flight suit.

The main narrative follows Peter Parker eight years later as he attempts to balance his Spider-Man activities with his sophomore year at Midtown School of Science and Technology. Tony Stark has been monitoring his development as potential Avengers candidate. Parker has been receiving Stark technology but is restricted from pursuing serious cases until his training is complete. He encounters Toomes’s operation during a routine investigation and pursues the case despite Stark’s instructions to stay away from it.

The middle act follows Parker’s investigation through a Washington Monument rescue sequence and a Staten Island Ferry incident. The third act involves the revelation that Toomes is the father of Parker’s homecoming dance date Liz, and the eventual confrontation between Parker and Toomes during a high-altitude Avengers cargo plane heist.

Tom Holland As Peter Parker

Holland was twenty years old when this film shot.

The performance commits to Peter Parker as actual teenager instead of as adult character pretending to be young. Holland’s specific physical capability (he had been trained as a dancer before his acting career) gives the character real athletic credibility during action sequences. The voice tone matches what a fifteen-year-old high schooler would sound like instead of what action heroes typically sound like. The acting choices throughout commit to teenage specificity instead of to mature-actor reassurance.

The casting is what sold me. Holland sounds like a sophomore who talks too fast, and that nervous energy does more for the character than any suit upgrade Stark could hand him.

The casting decision matched actor career trajectory to character requirements better than either Tobey Maguire (twenty-seven at first Spider-Man) or Andrew Garfield (twenty-eight at first Amazing Spider-Man) had achieved. Holland’s youth at the role’s assumption gave the character access to teenage believability that the previous adaptations hadn’t consistently maintained. The trade between actor experience and character age accuracy fell firmly on the age accuracy side, with results that improved on previous adaptations.

The performance also handles the Stark mentor relationship without falling into either rebellion or sycophancy. Parker treats Stark as adult figure he respects without letting the respect define him. The scenes between Holland and Robert Downey Jr. work with a generational dynamic that gives the relationship dramatic weight. The Stark-Parker mentorship became one of the franchise’s important elements across multiple later films before Stark’s eventual death in Endgame.

Michael Keaton As The Vulture

Michael Keaton plays Adrian Toomes / Vulture with real commitment and the performance ranks among the most successful MCU villain turns of the late Phase Three period. Toomes is a working-class entrepreneur who lost his business to wealthy interests consolidating an industry he’d helped create.

His motivation is class resentment instead of generic villain ambition. The performance works through specific psychology instead of through cartoonish menace.

The character work succeeds because Keaton commits to Toomes as a person who has convinced himself that his criminal activities are reasonable.

He provides for his family. He maintains his loyalty to his employees. He sees Stark and the wider Avengers structure as wealthy elites operating under different rules than working-class operators like himself. The performance gives the character coherent ideological structure instead of abstract villainy.

The third-act car ride sequence in which Toomes drives Parker and Liz to the homecoming dance is one of the franchise’s most successful single scenes. Toomes realizes mid-conversation that Parker is Spider-Man. The recognition happens through specific verbal observation instead of through dramatic revelation. Keaton plays the realization through facial work and vocal modulation that shows the character’s intelligence and emotional capacity. The scene is real thriller suspense instead of superhero spectacle. The audience experiences Toomes’s threat without requiring physical combat to establish it.

That car ride is the reason the 7 isn’t a 6. Nobody throws a punch. A father driving two kids to a dance works out who’s sitting in his back seat, and Keaton makes that quiet realization scarier than the plane fight that follows.

Keaton also returns the character in Morbius (2022), Sony’s separate Spider-Man-adjacent production, in a post-credits cameo with mixed results. The original Homecoming performance remains the canonical version of the character. That cameo squanders a villain this film built with real care.

The John Hughes Influence

Jon Watts’s direction draws explicitly on John Hughes-influenced high school filmmaking conventions. The film references Ferris Bueller’s Day Off directly through a scene homage. The high school dynamics, the friend group structure, the romantic uncertainty, and the parent-figure tensions all work within Hughes-influenced genre conventions. The trade between superhero action and high school character drama is balanced more carefully than most superhero films achieve.

The Ferris Bueller homage involves Parker running through suburban neighborhoods, jumping fences, and traversing backyards in pursuit of a goal that the wider narrative requires.

The visual quotation of Hughes’s specific staging is deliberate. The audience that recognizes the reference receives additional engagement through the cross-genre acknowledgment. Audiences who don’t recognize the reference still receive the kinetic sequence on its own terms.

The Liz Allan romantic subplot works through specific Hughes-influenced conventions. Parker’s social awkwardness, his unrequited interest, his eventual discovery that his crush’s father is his antagonist: all of this follows Hughes-era teen film conventions while integrating them with the superhero plot. The integration succeeds because the high school material is treated with comparable dramatic weight to the action material instead of as subordinate filler. Liz Allan is a real character instead of a romantic plot device.

The MCU Integration

Tony Stark’s mentor presence integrates Spider-Man into the MCU without subordinating Parker’s specific story to broader franchise machinery.

Stark appears in approximately fifteen minutes of screen time across the runtime. The screen time is sufficient to establish the mentorship dynamic without dominating the Parker-centered narrative. The trade between standalone Spider-Man story and MCU integration is handled more carefully than Iron Man 2 had managed with its Avengers Initiative setup.

The integration also works through references to broader MCU events without requiring audience familiarity.

The Battle of New York is referenced as the source of the alien technology Toomes recovered. Captain America appears in fictional PSA videos that play in Parker’s high school. The Avengers cargo plane that Toomes attempts to heist is an MCU plot device that the film explains sufficiently for standalone viewers. The MCU presence enriches the film without dominating it.

Fifteen minutes of Stark is the right dose, and I respect the restraint. The Captain America PSA videos are the funniest use of the Avengers in the film, because they shrink the whole franchise down to something a bored high school kid would roll his eyes at.

Later Tom Holland Spider-Man appearances would tilt the balance more toward MCU integration. Far From Home would work more heavily as Avengers-aftermath material.

No Way Home would deploy multiverse mechanics that connected the character to broader franchise developments. Homecoming represents the optimal balance point where Spider-Man’s specific story drives the narrative while MCU integration provides enrichment instead of dominance.

The Action Sequences

The action is fine, and fine is about all I can say for it. The Staten Island Ferry sequence in which Parker fails to stop Toomes and a Spider-Man-induced ferry split requires Stark’s rescue is structurally inventive. The Washington Monument rescue sequence establishes Parker’s swing-based physical capabilities. The climactic Avengers cargo plane heist provides aerial-action setpiece with specific visual identity.

The choreography emphasizes Parker’s specific capabilities instead of generic superhero action.

He swings between buildings instead of flying through the air. He uses web-shooters tactically instead of for generic combat. He encounters specific physical limitations (he can’t lift the ferry alone, he can’t match Toomes’s flight capabilities) that the script honors. The action works inside Spider-Man-specific physical reality instead of within abstract superhero spectacle.

It also commits to depicting Parker’s failures with suitable dramatic weight. The Staten Island Ferry sequence treats his failure as actual failure instead of as narrative obstacle to be overcome by the next scene. The Washington Monument rescue succeeds despite Parker’s specific limitations instead of because his powers automatically resolve the situation. The willingness to depict the protagonist failing gives the eventual victories suitable weight.

The failures are my favorite part of the action. Parker splitting a ferry and needing Stark to bail everyone out is a humiliating beat for a hero, and a teenage hero ought to get humiliated now and then.

Craft: The Best Phase Three Standalone

Is Spider-Man: Homecoming worth watching?

A 7. Spider-Man: Homecoming is one of the better Phase Three MCU entries and the best Peter Parker since Tobey Maguire. Tom Holland’s age-appropriate casting gives the character teenage believability that previous adaptations hadn’t consistently maintained. Michael Keaton’s Adrian Toomes / Vulture provides one of the more developed MCU antagonist performances. Jon Watts’s Hughes-influenced direction commits to high school dynamics with dramatic weight. The MCU integration enriches instead of dominates the standalone story. The action sequences work within Spider-Man-specific physical reality.

The 7 stands. Keaton, Holland’s casting and that car ride keep it well above the usual Marvel assembly line, and a thin Liz Allan and a merely competent third-act fight keep it out of the 8s. It’s the Spider-Man film I’d hand to somebody who swears they’re done with superheroes.

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