Swing Shift: SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING

The latest product from the Marvel Studios factory is Spider-Man: Homecoming, a co-production with Columbia Pictures, that company making less an admission of failure and more a signal of strong showbiz jealousies. The Sony subsidiary hasn’t been able to make a Spider-Man feature as good as Sam Raimi’s since letting him go, but surely the powers that be were only interested in loosening the reins on their rights to the character when they saw the consistent huge grosses and quality control over at the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They didn’t want to do right by the character so much as do right by their producers and stockholders. Still, the result is precisely what you’d hope and expect from bringing in the people who brought us the whole Avengers product line. It’s brightly lit and full of good-humored banter, features a great cast of familiar faces playing colorful characters, and stops every so often for a dazzlement of colorful CG. Though the formula’s getting tired, this new entry manages a high degree of charm and fast-paced entertainment (and even a few genuine surprises). In addition to the predictable polish and routine beats of a Marvel plot machine, this widget has a sweetness and an energy that makes it slightly better than average. It’s good fun.

Picking up during the events of last year’s Captain America: Civil War, where this new interpretation of Spidey was first introduced recruited by Iron Man to be a potential second-string Avenger, Homecoming finds Peter Parker (Tom Holland) initially excited to be one of the gang. (This movie’s biggest uphill climb is having to bounce its continuity out of what was easily the MCU’s worst movie, a dull grey 147-minute slog.)  Alas, his dreams will not be coming true any time soon. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) gifts him a souped-up supersuit and tells him to stick to being a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. The boy’s just fifteen, after all. There’ll be plenty of time to be a real hero when he’s older. This leaves the kid antsy and eager to prove himself, and allows the movie to stretch out with what’s always best about Spidey’s appeal: his average, every day, everyman problems. He has homework, an extracurricular academic challenge team, a cheerfully nerdy best friend (Jacob Batalon), an unrequited crush (Laura Harrier), a bully (Tony Revolori), a sweet prickly teammate (Zendaya), and a kind aunt (Marisa Tomei). He has a lot on his plate, plus the whole sneaking out every evening to patrol the streets, swinging from buildings to stop bike thieves and ATM bandits. 

Writer-director Jon Watts (of the small, tense, kids-in-over-their-heads thriller Cop Car) and his five co-writers understand the inherent charm of Spider-Man. They make him a relatable stressed-out teenager, just trying to fit in and do well at school while testing his powers. (They’re great, after all, and so, too, are his responsibilities.) With a bounce in its step, the movie makes like its hero and juggles the demands placed upon it quite skillfully. It weaves itself into the fabric of the MCU with better deftness than some of its inferiors, rooting its villain (The Vulture, played by Batman and Birdman himself, Michael Keaton) motivation in the aftermath of The Avengers. One of the more memorable villains in this mega-franchise, his backstory has him with a contract to clean up the damage from the alien battle, a lucrative deal that gets pulled when SHIELD classifies the high-tech debris. Now he’s flying in a makeshift jet-propelled wingspan, making his money on the black market, smuggling gadgets stolen from the various film’s climactic calamities (Winter Soldier’s D.C. craters, Ultron’s rattled fictional city, and so on). He and Peter – little guys hoping to make big marks – both have struggles proving themselves in this new outsized ecosphere of heroes and villains, which gives their clash a little charge. Keaton’s world-weariness plays nicely against Holland’s adorably boyish happy-to-be-here excitement, making for a compelling conflict.

Because the bad guy’s a local low-level troublemaker, he first shows up on Peter’s radar. Since the boy has trouble convincing Stark’s assistant (Jon Favreau) to take his calls, he feels obligated to put a stop to the mystery man’s bad deeds as he continually crosses paths with the evil plot. All this and the big dance, too. There’s the usual roster of fun character actors popping up to give the zippy plot some added wit and texture (Donald Glover, Bokeem Woodbine, Hannibal Buress, Angourie Rice, Martin Starr, and Michael Mando among the pleasant surprises popping up in tiny roles). They keep things pleasant and crackling with an agreeable comic charge between big splashy two-page spreads of action – leaping between buildings and off monuments, tussling with henchmen and saving civilians – that make for the usual superhero shenanigans. These are all suitably loud and explosive, but also swing with Spidey’s nimble acrobatics. Watts has managed to make a movie sparkling with enough fun and invention that its small piece pumps some life back to the larger franchise puzzle. It simply feels good to spend two hours with a character whose biggest conflict is wanting to contribute more positive impact in the world than he can manage. It’s easy to root for him.

On the Case: THE NICE GUYS

The Nice Guys is a good old-fashioned 70’s-style detective movie: loose, swaggering, hilarious, exciting, shaggy, and involving. A big crowd-pleaser of a period piece, it creates a convincing vintage stage on which to play out its antics, which happen to add up to one of the most compelling mystery plots in recent memory. Sharply directed and wittily written, think of it as the faster, dumber (in a good way), energetic pop flip side to Paul Thomas Anderson’s hazy Inherent Vice. It is impeccably mounted and high on 1977 Los Angeles detail. Pants are tight, morals are loose, wardrobes are bright, the oldies are current hits, cigarette smoke and polluted smog fills the air, and a low-level simmer of cynicism is everyone’s emotional baseline. It’s the perfect seedy environment for two low-level mismatched unlikely partners to stumble into a big conspiracy and try to sort it all out, and line their pockets, before the bad guys get worse.

The reluctant duo in a buddy action comedy is filmmaker Shane Black’s preferred dynamic, running through works he wrote (Lethal Weapon, The Long Kiss Goodnight) and directed (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Iron Man 3). But it has never been better expressed than here. One is a private eye hired to track down a missing girl. The other is an unlicensed freelance tough hired by said girl to stop those searching for her. Events go south and get shady, so the two decide to work together to unravel the whole nasty tangle in which they’ve found themselves. Someone (or several someones) else is after the girl, and she has her own suspicious reasons to remain missing. In typical pulpy mystery fashion, the men wander through a story full of clues and qualms provided by an array of eccentric and unseemly types played by an exquisitely memorable ensemble, while the center holds around the electric grumbling chemistry between our incompatible, but secretly super compatible, leads. It’s great fun.

Russell Crowe plays the tough guy. It is one of his finest performances, a lumbering physical presence with light and lithe comedic timing. He carries a Wallace Beery weight and gravitas, growling and tough, a heavy heavy, but soulful and wounded. He’s lonely and a loner, and a little sad about how alive brawling and tussling with bad men makes him feel. Even worse, he starts to feel a kinship with his unexpected partner. He’s Ryan Gosling as more a con man than a P.I., taking sweet little old ladies’ money for easy jobs. (One widow wants to know where her husband, “missing since the funeral,” is; Gosling glances at the urn on her mantle and solemnly promises to cash her check and find him.) He’s a squeaky, lean, scared, in-over-his-head scrambler, getting by with luck and happenstance. But he’s still sharp enough to piece together clues with the help of his precocious potty-mouthed 13-year-old daughter (Angourie Rice) who loves spending time with him, driving him around when he’s too buzzed to do it himself, which is often. He, too, is loath to admit that he’s found a new pal.

Together Crowe and Gosling, playing to and against type (a neat, compelling trick of star power), make a fine pairing – the straight-faced serious guy, and the flailing comic. They’re bickering and bumbling through a rough-and-tumble plot full of gumshoe incident and interestingly loopy interrogations often spilling over into pratfalls and slapstick stuntwork as malcontents, scumbags, and suspects cause trouble. There are gunfights and car chases, and plenty of instances of people falling out windows or rolling down hills. A vast scheme unravels in knots as a large cast (including Margaret Qualley, Kim Basinger, Keith David, Jack Kilmer, Lois Smith, Matt Bomer, and Yaya DaCosta among the recognizable faces) stringing along the various episodes from one clue to the next. Then, with shrewd timing, the story reaches surprising and satisfying roundabouts that spin the investigation off in fresh directions. To even suggest the shape it ultimately takes would be unfair to the film’s brilliantly structured sense of discovery. It eventually involves pornographers, eco-activists, experimental filmmakers, hitmen, Detroit auto execs, and the justice department, arriving at immensely satisfying smash-bang conclusions as every moving part clicks into pleasing place.

A deeply satisfying work of genre fiction, The Nice Guys is an engaging and confident trash beauty, with handsome nostalgia surfaces in slick frames provided by cinematographer Philippe Rousselot polishing a cavalcade of violence, nudity, swearing, and seamy underworld spelunking. All that is mixed in a screenplay flowing with wordy personality and hilarious physical beats, and story unfolding so cleverly that as its bighearted love for its characters’ connection sneaks in sideways it sweetens the suspense with genuine feeling. We want them to crack the case, but also become better people by learning to work with a new friend. It’s delightful even as it is brutal, a hard-charging lark. So fast and funny, driven by charismatic performances and compelling mystery, this somehow manages the trick of making the old new again. It’s at once sturdy throwback appeal and a fresh spin on material that could be tired, but isn’t here. Black’s preoccupations with bantering buddy dynamics expressed through action and intrigue are given their purest, most complete expression. This is a groovy, most completely enjoyable action comedy.