TLDR: Perfectly solid Marvel movie, somewhat meh as a Spider-man movie. Homecoming was a much better Spider-man tale. I probably would have enjoyed this one more if they had just come clean and called it what Disney and Sony are clearly going for - “Iron Man Junior.”
I said months ago that Peter Parker touristing around Europe didn’t seem very Spider-man, and the final product didn’t change my mind. Fighting giant city-destroying monsters isn’t very Spider-man, either. Perennial underdog Peter Parker having not one but two gigantic, rich, technologically-advanced organizations (Stark’s and Fury’s) on call also doesn’t feel very much like classic Spider-man. Nor does the fact that in this movie Spidey remains virtually silent throughout most of the fight scenes feel like him: there’s virtually no sign of his trademark quips, and what ones there are (“Going up!”) are throwaways that could come from any summer action hero.
(As an aside, the people behind this version of Spider-man seems to be obsessed with making every single one of his supporting cast act as comic relief, when in fact he’s the Marvel hero who needs it the least. As the recent video game illustrated brilliantly, Spidey acts as his own comic relief.)
Mysterio was pretty good - top third of MCU villains, say - but could have been as great as Homecoming’s Vulture. Mostly it’s the writing and dialogue: it’s perfectly functional but you never suspend disbelief and buy fully into the characters. When Spidey and Mysterio talk after the first fight, you don’t feel anything other than what was doubtless in the original script outline: INSERT SCENE WHERE PETER AND MYSTERIO BOND. And when Mysterio tries to undermine Peter’s confidence - which is pretty much his entire schtick, character-wise - it doesn’t feel especially devastating.
That said, the mid-movie Mysterio sequence was one of the few places that felt like classic Spider-man, the other quintessential Spidey bits being the very end set in NYC as well as the mid-credits scene, for obvious reasons.
The rest of the movie wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t Spider-man. It’s about a guy’s attempts to live up to the legacy of Tony Stark - Iron Man Junior, like I said. It’s about a guy who is expected to fill big shoes, and whenever he tries to do anything different, either fate or the people who expect him to fill the shoes intervene.
That’s a perfectly good character arc, but it’s not Spider-man. Classic Peter Parker is quintessentially the person who has to make it on his own, who has to find his own way, the guy who makes it up on the fly, because his support network is either missing or, as in the case of classic Mae, doesn’t fully understand him.
And we don’t need the “big shoes to fill” character arc in the MCU, because we already had it. That was the driving force behind Tony Stark - trying to live up to/outdo/be/not be his father.
Poor MCU Peter Parker - even his character arc is a hand-me-down from Tony Stark!