Spider-Man: No Way Home: Film Review

When rival publisher DC's mythos began to collapse under its own weight in the 1980s, the heroes who clobbered through the pages of Marvel Comics were still youngsters. For Pete's sake, Superman and Batman had begun combating crime in the late 1930s, and the various variations of their storylines, not to mention those of lesser-known characters, had built up in perplexing or conflicting ways. The answer was a series called Crisis on Infinite Earths, which imagined a collision of alternate realities in which some characters died, others had their stories straightened out, and many (but far from all) overly literal fanboys could stop worrying if next month's adventure contradicted one they read fifteen years ago.

That well-received series addressed some clear issues. By contrast, one might wonder what issues are being addressed in Jon Watts' Spider-Man: No Way Home, in which Spidey and Doctor Strange open a rift between parallel dimensions, forcing Tom Holland's Spider-Man to face villains who previously appeared in films opposite Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield's Spider-Man.

Was the issue that "Marvel movies don't have enough fan service"? This film is a perfect example of that tendency, in which small bits of pandering (whether loving or cynical) make inside jokes, include needless cameos, or resurrect intergalactic bounty hunters because there aren't enough Star Wars things out there for Disney to sell.

Some of the fan services work well here, but others are overt enough that you expect an actor to smile at you after delivering his line. But, in the end, No Way Home uses its multiverse mayhem to address the only true issue with the Holland-era webslinger: the Iron Man-ification of the character, in which his already incredible abilities are constantly eclipsed by the equipment bestowed upon him by billionaire jerk-hero Tony Stark. By a wide measure, this is the least entertaining of the Watts/Holland films (intentionally, to some extent), but it's a whole lot better than Sam Raimi's overcrowded and ill-conceived Spider-Man 3.

The plot picks up where the previous film left off: Spidey is seated outside Penn Station when J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons) reveals his true identity. Soon, everyone knows it's Peter Parker behind the mask, and multitudes of people believe Jameson's odd assertion that Spider-Man is a war criminal. (Of course, this version of Daily Bugle editor Jameson is based on real-life idiocy promoter Alex Jones; nevertheless, as is so often the case these days, the intended parody pales in comparison to the actual stupidity.)

Our protagonist's life becomes difficult as he and his friends Ned (Jacob Batalon) and MJ (Zendaya) deal with frequent media attention and uncomfortable incidents at school. This renown somehow (don't ask how) precludes the three geniuses from getting into any of the institutions to which they apply. So Peter Parker travels to Greenwich Village in the hopes that Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) can cast a spell that will restore his anonymity.

Strange has had to control his own out-of-control magic, which threatens to call everyone on every parallel Earth who knows the name Peter Parker to our planet. But the cat's out of the bag, and everybody who's seen a trailer knows at least some of the characters who'll be appearing, starting with Alfred Molina's Doctor Octopus, who will be the most entertaining.

As the old villains reemerge, we're reminded that almost every one of them is a nice person gone wrong, some of whom have been turned monsters by the same kind of bad luck that made Peter a hero. So Peter objects when Strange prepares to send them back to their own timelines (where, as we recall, the majority of them perish spectacularly). He insists on trying to heal the baddies before sending them home, urged on by his highly moral Aunt May (Marisa Tomei, the only lady in the multiverse who can get away with the godawful costumes these movies give her). Spidey and Strange fight it out in a mystical dimension where the scenery goes all Inception on them, then Spidey snatches a magic doodad and sets off to cure the bad guys.

Rather than revealing any of the plot's twists and turns, let's address the elephant in the room: Who thought it was a good idea to tackle this material so soon after the animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse did almost the same thing? No Way Home can only look staid in compared to that rollicking, eye-popping adventure, relying on the novelty of faces we haven't seen in a while and building up to the kind of operatic emotional moments the earlier Watts films preferred to avoid.

Yes, Peter suffers here, losing so much that he's in danger of losing the enthusiasm that has made Tom Holland's Peter Parker such a hit on-screen since Captain America: Civil War. Despite the extraordinary circumstances, the angst feels like the paint-by-numbers process of superhero franchise-building: more of the same.

The film's last moment, though, has a brightness to it that makes one hopeful. What if all of this colliding-multiverse nonsense released Peter from attachments to not only his previous incarnations but even some of his grander present-tense pals? Would it be so horrible if he could be a "local Spider-Man" for a time, without having to combat aliens and big monsters every other year? Allow Doctor Strange to delve into the mystical depths while Spidey swings.

To be honest, the continual debate about spoilers and those concerned with finding them (a peculiar area of the fan universe) will be irrelevant soon enough, leaving the film's creases to be meticulously examined. After all, Jameson isn't the only one who sees Spider-Man as a steady source of web traffic.

But it's clear from the start that this film was made to be consumed and relished. That will include whoops and hollers from enthusiastic fans in theatres, when "Spider-Man" will first expose its secrets, and then, more than likely, show off its legs, in what has become a more elusive phenomenon.