A little of the new Spider-Man went an exhilaratingly long way in Captain America: Civil War last year. But a lot of him goes almost nowhere in this slack and spiritless solo escapade, spun off from an initially intriguing premise that deflates around you with a low whine as you watch, like a punctured jumping castle.
The big, and theoretically cute, idea behind it is that Peter Parker - now played by the young British actor Tom Holland as a 15-year-old high-schooler - has to balance his super-heroic duties with the more prosaic traumas of everyday teenage life.
But the film's action parts are staged with so little nerve or showmanship, and the coming-of-age ones are so feebly emulsified from high-school comedies past, that you wonder if the two halves were assembled by different teams of genre specialists who somehow ended up with each other's commissions by mistake.
Jon Watts (Cop Car) is the latest green-behind-the-ears Sundance-type director to have been handed the keys to a blockbuster along with, presumably, a stern warning from the owners to bring her back before dark with a full tank and scratch-free paintwork...