by jellydonut25 » Sun Jul 09, 2017 11:57 pm
Saw it. It was good. Not great. Keaton was great, and I love finally having a couple of these Marvel movies with compelling villains (this and GOTG 2 both nailed it there), but the movie was missing...SOMETHING. It lacked heart somehow. I think because, even though there were good characters, none of the relationships between them felt like they had any substance. The actress who played Liz was BAD and there was NO chemistry between the two of them (you can argue "That's the point, because she's not "supposed" to be "the one" she's just a crush," but that still makes it a BAD relationship). Not enough between Peter and May or Peter and Stark or Peter and Happy to make those feel like relationships with actual arcs. So you're left with Peter and Ned, but that relationship never goes through anything. There are no ups and downs. There's no friction. Nothing defines that relationship. They're just nerd friends, and because Ned is let-in on the secret so early, he's just constantly understanding. Even when Peter bails on him and leaves him at the party, he's not mad at Peter, he's sad for his friend that everyone is picking on him while he's gone. This is the movie's biggest problem by a lot. It feels thrown together and inconsequential because these characters all seem like throwaways because there are no good, developed relationships.
There are other issues, but they're pretty minor. Not a fan of KAREN (though the rest of the tech I was okay with...an AI just pushes it too far towards Iron Man territory for me), the score is mostly forgettable (though the Vulture score is good, the rest is trash), the movie false starts one too many times and it got annoying, frankly, and I woulda liked to hear someone actually call him The Vulture (what is with ALL comic movies STILL lacking the testicular fortitude to just use the damned names?). Again, these are minor things, that, were they the film's only problems, it'd be a 4.5/5.
STILL, it's a fun movie. Peter is mostly dead-on. Vulture is GREAT and compelling. The humor is good, and very appropriate for a Spider-Man movie (and I loved the stuff in the suburbs showing how hard it would be for him to exist outside NYC), and I actually loved that it's a small scale movie. It's about illegal weapons, not the end of the universe. That's nice. I liked the diversity too, and especially that they didn't make a big deal of it. Flash doesn't NEED to be an Aryan jock jerk, he just needs to be a bully. Making him a smarmy rich little ba***rd is an inspired change, especially for such a minor character. I also thought the one kid on the Decathlon team, I think he was Indian (the one who rang the bell and said, "False") was funny. The overall plot and story was good too, and Peter's noble F-UPs were well-done, which is good, considering how easy it would be to botch and make him look like a moron/jerk. He's kept in the dark so much, that with what he sees happening on the streets, he thinks he has to act because nobody is listening to him. If they can just figure out a way that KAREN can be broken or something forever, it's pitch-perfect Spider-Man by the end, with him proving that he doesn't NEED the tech to be Spider-Man.
I could see it growing on me because of Keaton's Vulture, who's easily one of the two or three best villains of the entire MCU, but for now, I'm at like a 3.5/5, with room to grow, and it's behind Raimi's first film as my favorite Spider-Man film.