Spider-Man: Homecoming Review - 9 Ups & 3 Downs

5. Michael Keaton

Michael Keaton's best performances tend to be on the weird spectrum or have some sort of fundamental duplicitousness about them. He is a master of performing disguises and disguised characters, and his Adrian Toomes sits nicely alongside his Batman and Bruce Wayne.

But he's more than that: you can see elements of Keaton's other performances in Toomes - there's something of Beetlejuice's monstrosity in his vulture, and there's also the homely charisma of Multiplicity - he's absolutely no one-dimensional crook. And there's also something of Alfred Molina's tragic Doc Ock there too: he might be evil, but he's motivated by good (or at least personally logical morality) and he never really abandons his fundamental charm. He's more an advert for moral greyness, clashing against a pure, uncomplicated morality in Peter Parker.

Keaton never turns his Toomes into a cliche (despite how easily he could have become one), and nor does he turn him into a pantomime act. He's ferocious but layered and he feels like a man wearing several masks through necessity. Only when we discover who he really is and why he does what he does do we find him at his most comfortable, and in that respect he shares a lot with Keaton's Batman.