Spiderman: Homecoming: A Dumbed-Down Super-Zero Super-Hero Film

Starring: Tom Holland, Robert Downey Jr, Michael Kaeton

Directed by: Tom Watts

Rating: **(2 stars)

What the f…k! is the  last thing we hear our underage super-hero’s sexy aunt May , say before the end-credits begin to roll…

And I felt the same. WTF! The super-hero genre from Hollywood is not only done to death,they are now exploiting the corpse of the dead genre in necrophiliac motions that left me a wee nauseated and mighty underwhelmed.

The latest Spiderman film much hyped , and mightily praised by critics who  love the film’s transparency and directness, is like  a cold shower on a wintry morning . You wait for that bracing after-shower feeling to pervade your senses . But the film only leaves you with tneemptiness  of coitus interruptus and a smell of déjà vu, and not a pleasant one at that.

Having come after a startling plethora of super-hero  films in the last 3 years(what’s with this obsession with superheroes, is America looking to find an antidote to Trump?) Spiderman: Homecomingcashes in on the vulnerability and callowness of  the super-hero as he grapples with the  changes in his body and mind far beyond the hormonal.

There is Robert Downey Jr’s Ironman,trying hard to play the wry mentor to the pubescent flying hero who will fly by night even if his aunt is paranoid about his nuptial activities.

I liked Marisa Tomei’s Aunt May. She is sexy and yet aunt-like. I’d have loved to know more about her sex life. But for that we will have to wait for Spiderman to grow up.

The early scenes show Tom Holland’s Spiderman struggling with his body-suit and self-esteem as director Jon Watts struggles with contrary thoughts on how to proceed with the plot: should  it  chart the flowering  of the incipient super-hero into a savior of civilization? Or should it just court the clunky wannabe super-hero’s  bumbling antics  to show that imperfection is what makes this child-crusader a man of the masses?

The narrative follows the latter path, leaving very little room for the audience to feel elated  in the presence of  a boy who could well be the  next President Of America.

Who knows!

Unpredictability and surprises are not the hallmark of this particular take on super-heroism. Littered with self-mocking references to the super-hero genre and often plotted to a  bloated sense of self-critical pomposity, the narrative takes excessive recourse to being exactly what it tells us it is not. Director Watts hints throughout the lengthy film of denuding the super-hero of its delusions of grandeur and then sets  up Spiderman in precisely those positions of aspiring supremacy that seem absurdly amplified when a boy of 15 is at the centre of apocalyptic attention.

Tom Holland’s Spiderman is like a pubescent video-game figure embracing the boy-nextdoor image for the sake of a democratic image. Clumsy and misplaced in his sense of propriety Holland  comes across as a very poorly conceived and packaged Spidermanas compared with his predecessors Tony Maguire and Andrew Garfield who were young but still old enough to understand that flying heroes are a thing of the imagination.

Holland looks lost most  of the time. Not his fault. He is placed in situations that demand herculean  histrionics to not seem silly. In one sequence when he reaches his girlfriend’s home to pick her up for a date, the girl’s father offers him a drink,

“Sir, I am too young to drink,”  Spiderman responds with that look of glazed earnestness that we soon recognize as being part of this Spiderman’s karma .

The  other far more experienced actors seem fairly distanced from the reality that the narrative embraces. Robert Downey Jr as Iron Man once played Charlie Chaplin , and very well too. Here I  could almost HEAR his ennui.Michael Keaton so effective as Batman once upon a time,is reduced to making  a series of faces on camera to convey closeted infamy.Hamming is legitimatized in a film where the layering is lobotomized.

The assorted cast of villains semi-villains and global rogues play their roles with infuriating impunity .The standard instruction  to  the actors seems to be… PLAY IT STRAIGHT.

We get the point. But the film’s painful attempts at cracking the elementary appeal of the super-hero genre by hook or crook is exasperating, to say the least. Its cultural inclusiveness made me cringe. Spiderman’s best friend played by Jacob Batalon is Hawaiian while his girlfriend played by Laura Harrier is a Black American.I waited for Irrfan Khan or Riz Ahmed to show up  as a Jehadi terrorist.

We were spared that one. But not much else.