Marvel, with its armies of true believers and domination of both movie theaters and a click-baiting media, rendered its product line critic proof long ago.
With his compact size and bright, easy smile, Holland still looks and sounds more like a kid than an adult, and he radiates the same sweet, earnest decency that has helped make Peter and Spider-Man an enduring twin act.
Peter’s boyish good nature has always been his most productive weapon, even more so than his super-ability to spin webs and swing by a thread.
Spider-Man racks up a great deal of mileage over the course of the movie for the simple reason that, like almost every Marvel production, this one is too long and, at two and a half hours, overstays its welcome.
Even at their chilliest and PG-13 meanest, great actors like Willem Dafoe and Alfred Molina, two of a number of series veterans making return appearances, can warm up industrial material just by virtue of their presence.
It would be nice to see what Watts could do if he weren’t constricted by Marvel’s rigid template, which gives the studio’s movies their clearly defined genre identity but also means that they’re more alike than not.