A refreshing reboot for Spidey

Thursday, Jul 6, 2017 7:00 PM

Tom Holland stars as Spider-Man in “Spider-Man: Homecoming.”

Chuck Zlotnick/Sony Pictures Entertainment-Columbia Pictures

In “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” Tom Holland’s 15-year-old webslinger, Peter Parker, is more mathlete than athlete, a geeky high school sophomore whose beanpole physique is as likely to be sheathed in the iconic, form-fitting red-and-blue bodysuit of comic-book lore as a baggy T-shirt on which two cartoon molecules are shown conversing with each other. (“I lost an electron,” says one. “Are you positive?” replies the other.)

Although not quite pimple-faced or pencil-necked, this uber-dweeb anchors an authentic, refreshingly nerdy and high-spirited reboot of the well-worn Marvel franchise, one in which the obsessions of a certain branch of male adolescence compete for the attention of its hero with the underground arms dealing by a supervillain named Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton).

In a breath of fresh air, “Homecoming” opens with a prologue that, despite the movie’s origin-story contours, has nothing to do with getting bitten by a radioactive spider, or the catalyzing death of Peter’s Uncle Ben. Peter’s guardian Aunt May is still in the picture, but, as played by a frisky Marisa Tomei.

Set in the aftermath of the Battle of New York – aka The Incident – depicted in 2012’s “The Avengers,” the opening of “Homecoming” introduces us to Keaton’s Toomes: an engineer who gets fired from his job rebuilding the devastated city, but not before he manages to furtively salvage some extraterrestrial weapons technology left lying around in the wake of the alien attack.

Fast-forward to the present day, when Toomes is now a peddler and designer of illegal high-tech guns, flitting above the nighttime underworld of New York in a vulturelike flying apparatus. In short order, Peter gets wind of Toomes’ black-market business, and he tries to put a stop to it.

Peter is both aided and hampered in this adventure by a fancy suit designed by Tony (Robert Downey Jr.), who cautions his young protégé against getting too deep into crime-fighting before he’s seasoned. As part of what Peter unironically refers to as his “internship” with Stark Industries, Tony has disabled some of the most powerful features of the Spidey costume, setting it to what the suit’s Jarvislike voice assistant calls “training-wheels mode.”

The film, for much of the first two acts, takes itself just about that unseriously, maintaining a jokey, self-aware tone that is nicely evocative of the original comics.

As youth-oriented and lightly larky as “Spider-Man: Homecoming” may be, the focus of the film can’t stay small forever. Like its protagonist, who seems to be itching for a growth spurt of his own, the movie ultimately gets a little big for its breeches, in a mayhem-and-effects-soaked climax that suffers from many of the excesses of other Marvel movies.

That is to be expected, and yet it does not dim the bright and breezy story that precedes it. Marvel fans know this by now, but stay for the credits for a postlude that will deflate any lingering feelings of undue pomp and circumstance.