Spider-Man: Homecoming — A tangled web

Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for sci-fi action and violence, and mild profanity
By Derrick Bang

It’s both ironic and yet appropriate that this newest incarnation of Spider-Man — let’s call it Spider-Man 3.0 — works best when young Peter Parker is out of costume.

Try as he might, Peter (Tom Holland) can't seem to make things work properly ... either
in his personal life, or as the web-slinging would-be hero, Spider-Man.

As originally conceived by writer Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko, way back in 1962, Peter was an angst-ridden high school outcast: a nerd long before that word became a fashionable descriptor. Eternally abused by campus tormentor Flash Thompson, ignored by all the cool kids, Peter took solace from his scientific curiosity and the protective embrace of home life with his beloved Uncle Ben and Aunt May.

British actor Tom Holland — so powerful as the eldest son forced to help his family cope with a tsunami’s aftermath, in 2012’s The Impossible — persuasively nails this all-essential aspect of Peter’s personality. He has a ready smile that falters at the faintest slight, real or imagined; he’s all gangly limbs and unchecked, hyperactive eagerness. Peter frequently doesn’t know how to handle himself, because he doesn’t yet possess a strong sense of what his “self” actually is.

That said, director/co-scripter Jon Watts’ update of Peter gives the lad a firmer social grounding that he possessed in all those early Marvel comic books. He’s a valued member of his school’s academic decathlon squad, where he’s routinely thrust alongside teammates Flash (Tony Revolori), crush-from-a-distance Liz (Laura Harrier) and the aloof, slightly mysterious Michelle (Zendaya, the effervescent star of TV’s engaging K.C. Undercover).

And — oh, yes — Peter is a-bubble with enthusiasm over the secret he cannot share with anyone: his recent trip to Berlin, supposedly as a science intern for Stark Enterprises, but where he actually joined Iron Man and other super-powered associates and went mano a mano against Captain America (recent back-story details supplied via a clever flashback).

Impetuously assuming that he’ll therefore be made a member of the Avengers, Peter is chagrined when days and weeks pass without a word from Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) or his right-hand man, Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau). I mean, Spidey deflected Captain America’s shield, right? What the heck is Tony waiting for?

Retrieving stolen bicycles and helping little old ladies may establish cred as “your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man,” but it hardly stacks up against saving the world from super-powered bad guys. Peter chafes at being abandoned on the sidelines, and thus makes the mistake that Stark anticipated.

Wholly contrary to the essential divide between civilian and costumed life, Peter begins to employ his alter-ego as a crutch: a means to enhance his social status.

“But I’m nothing without the costume,” he eventually wails, in genuine torment, to Tony.

“If that’s true,” Tony replies, “then you don’t deserve it.”

Riddick: Back to basics

Riddick (2013) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rating: R, for strong violence, profanity, sexual candor and occasional nudity
By Derrick Bang 

Richard B. Riddick is the Timex watch of action antiheroes: No matter how bone-crunching the licking, he keeps on ticking.

Armed with no more than a large bone club, Riddick (Vin Diesel) attempts to survive
his encounter with a particularly large "mud demon." This creature is between him and
access to a safer part of this wayward planet, so Riddick is determined to win this
little skirmish. Rest assured, though: This won't be the last he sees of mud demons.

You’ve got to admire a guy who can survive a fall of several hundred feet (perhaps even more) while getting buried beneath a massive rock avalanche ... with no more than some cuts, bruises and a leg fracture that he sets himself, by jamming metal pins into the surrounding muscle.

Granted, this character’s otherwise cartoonish invulnerability is made almost palatable by Vin Diesel’s growling, glowering performance; one can imagine Riddick is fueled by ’tude alone. Bottle the stuff, and he’d made a fortune selling it to up-and-coming action hero wannabes.

Diesel follows in the well-stomped footsteps of earlier strong, monosyllabic types played by Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger; like them, Diesel has made a virtue of his limited acting range. He’s a dour teddy bear on steroids: an apparent bad guy — introduced, back in 2000’s Pitch Black, as a “notorious convict” — who nonetheless respects honor, reluctantly protects the weak and disenfranchised, and turns into a coldly efficient predator only when dealing with Those Who Deserve It.

Even when chained and (apparently) helpless, Riddick can issue threats with a layer of menace that Diesel sells quite persuasively.

Like I said, you gotta admire the guy.

Riddick has become an intriguing franchise for Diesel and writer/director David Twohy. Following Pitch Black — which Twohy scripted from a story by Jim and Ken Wheat — they re-teamed for 2004’s The Chronicles of Riddick and, that same year, an animated short called Dark Fury (Diesel voicing his character, Twohy supplying the story). But Chronicles was an overblown box-office bomb, its complicated narrative adding far too much extraneous stuff to the first film’s plain-vanilla, survive-the-threat template.

No surprise, then, that Twohy has gone back to basics with this new film, which sports the appropriately simple title of Riddick. Wisely dumping the second film’s Egyptian-esque, Necromonger intrigue that felt swiped from 1994’s Stargate, Twohy gives us the same basic, one-against-impossible-odds story that made Pitch Black such a nifty little B-thriller.

Indeed, at times the echoes of Pitch Black are so loud, that this “new” film almost could be considered a remake.