But beyond being capably played by great actors and looking pretty nifty on their own—with Gyllenhaal’s Mysterio being a special kind of achievement given how funky that Steve Ditko-inspired fishbowl helmet appears in comics—each of these baddies offers something more refreshing to the MCU than a new dose of villainy; they give a sense of scale, adding a bumpy texture to Marvel Studios’ often glossy sheen.
As a consequence, Toomes becomes a criminal, selling the alien tech he salvaged before getting shown the door. When much later in the picture Peter Parker learns the father of his girlfriend is the winged thief who calls himself the Vulture, he asks how someone could do something like this to their daughter. “I’m not doing anything to her, Pete, I’m doing this for her,” Vulture responds. “How do you think your buddy Stark paid for that tower or any of his little toys? Those people up there, the rich and powerful, they do whatever they want. Guys like us, you and me, they don’t care about us. We build their roads and we fight all their wars and everything, but they don’t care about us.”
With Marvel Studios keenly observing how Peter Parker works best as the everyman superhero (or every boy as they seem to want him to stay in high school in perpetuity), the company likewise has kept his villains far more grounded than the generic ones chasing magical stones and cubes. Keaton’s Vulture only cares about his family, and then makes Spider-Man a target because this dumb kid is too young to realize he’s defending a status quo that leaves people on the bottom.
While not quite as subversive, Gyllenhaal’s Quentin Beck expands on this by turning out to be one of the many faceless scientists at Stark Industries who works on Tony Stark’s multi-billion-dollar ideas and sees none of the rewards for it. The holographic system Tony introduces in Captain America: Civil War turned out to be Beck’s passion project, and Tony swooped in and put his name on it and took all the credit. While it is also true that Beck is a narcissistic psychopath who probably shouldn’t have been in any position of authority, the film nevertheless makes a strong case that the rosy vision of the Avengers just being spectacular is only that… a vision. And one as unrealistic as Mysterio’s illusions. If you are going to build this world beyond surface level, there will be a bottom to a universe that places superheroes at the top.
There is likewise a meta-textual critique of the Marvel Studios films spoken with glee by Gyllenhaal. Over the last decade, Gyllenhaal has flirted time and again with superhero movies—having been considered to play both Spider-Man and even Batman in a previous decade—but he never actually did anything so straightforward. He’s instead become a compellingly quirky character actor with movie star good looks. His recent triumvirate of creeps in Nightcrawler, Okja, and even the daft Velvet Buzzsaw is a showcase for his ability to play unhinged figures in a range between the subtle and the bigger-than-a-Mad-Titan.
The wonderful thing about these villains is they’re correct: Adrian Toomes did get stepped on by capitalistic vultures and an easily lobbied government, and mass audiences will stay away from creative genius unless it’s in the MCU and spouting nonsense about “elementals” and a “multi-verse.” The movie makes them clearly the bad guys because they’re willing to kill over this, but they’re also giving Pete a “low to the ground” vantage of his other Avengers buddies who spend their time lifting robot-made continents into the sky or fighting over an enchanted glove that can incredulously resurrect the dead. Even though the modern Spider-Man movies are flat out comedies—more so than even the fairly goofy yet angst-ridden Sam Raimi era—they also keep their villains and heroes squarely planted with their webs at street level.
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This is further compounded by MJ (Zendaya) figuring out Peter Parker is Spider-Man on her own. This, for the record, is accurate to the comics where Mary Jane Watson also didn’t need to be told Pete was lying to her, but in the films, it is additionally charming because she is not another romantic interest awed by the male hero’s greatness; Zendaya’s MJ has the boy figured out.
read more: Complete Schedule of Upcoming Marvel MCU Movies
David Crow is the Film Section Editor at Den of Geek. He’s also a member of the Online Film Critics Society. Read more of his work here. You can follow him on Twitter @DCrowsNest.
