Jean-Paul’s rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: Surprisingly lazy story but still fun in all the ways a Spider-Man movie should.

Alright, let’s do this one last time. His name is Peter Parker (Tom Holland). He was bitten by a radioactive spider. And for four movies, he has been the one, the only Spider-Man. This time, our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man is off to see Europe on a class trip because that’s what science and technology schools do these days. This is sort of a coming-of-age story with Peter extremely uncomfortable with being an Avenger and his unwillingness to step up from being just the friendly neighborhood type. He is also still bummed about the death of Tony Stark and freaked out by Tony’s belief in him and the immense responsibility that Tony seems to be putting on him.

This is also a revenge film. The main bad guy is angry at Tony Stark for turning down his brilliant ideas and going a different direction than the villain wanted so he assembles a group of other brilliant people who Stark ignored to take control of the vast Stark weapons array. The Marvel Universe has stood apart from others like DC by creating realistic villains, but it fails with this movie. The biggest failure is the fact that the villain already seems to have both unprecedented wealth and much of the weapons array that they are trying to take over. The way the villain does so is also quite convoluted and relies on some serious 10-dimensional chess to make come true.

The good news is that Tom Holland continues to be a really awesome Peter/Spider-Man and does an excellent job of being the best mix of live-action and comic-booky that has always made Spider-Man fun. His awkward attempts at winning MJ (Zendaya) with the help of his best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) are fun and amusing and it’s a shame that they didn’t just stick to that.

I hope that the laziness of the story is not a harbinger of things to come for the Marvel Comic Universe as we progress into stage four of Disney’s master plan for movie domination, but there’s still some good comedy and fun characters that pull this film up from mediocrity. I sincerely hope that they push for more things like the fantastic “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” and lean into more Spider-Man movie magic like that.