With his secret identity exposed to the world’s press, Peter Parker (Tom Holland) recruits Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to get his life back on track. But a mishap with a magic spell has unintended consequences as Peter faces up to the foes of Spider-Men past.
★★★★✰
Surprisingly, for a hero as universally beloved as Spider-Man, the Webbed Crusader’s big-screen outings in the MCU have so far yielded slightly tepid results. Though Jon Watt’s signature style of high-school action-comedy suits the character’s temperament near-perfectly on paper, and both Homecoming and Far From Home certainly aren’t short on charm, there’s still been a nagging feeling that Marvel and Sony’s biggest live-action money-maker is pulling his punches. The first act of No Way Home gives a similar impression: a cheery, light-hearted jaunt across New York as Peter struggles with his newfound celebrity status and the first of the film’s many villains in the form of the college admissions process. It’s charming. It’s fun. But it never really feels like Spider-Man.
Perhaps that’s because, much like its eponymous hero, No Way Home’s first half suffers from a bit of an identity problem. Tasked with introducing Marvel’s multiverse, with all the timeline-wrangling contractual disputes that inevitably entails, much of the film’s first ninety-minutes bounce between John Hughes–style comedy and Endgame-level cinematic event with the grace and poise of an escaped convict in a rhino suit. Jon Watts’ more whimsical take on the character really struggles when lumped with these sorts of stakes, and the problems faced by Peter Parker and by Spider-Man are so vastly different in scale that for a while they struggle to intersect properly in the way that makes the character so appealing. If this all sounds very negative so far, then good. It’s a fundamental problem with the film’s premise, and it’s a big one. But by the end of No Way Home’s 2 hours and 28-minute runtime, it won’t matter one bit.
Much of the film’s first ninety-minutes bounce between John Hughes–style comedy and Endgame-level cinematic event with the grace and poise of an escaped convict in a rhino suit.
That’s because, even without the nostalgia-boost of seeing the sinister-several on-screen at the same time, as the film goes on it becomes increasingly clear that the writers (Erik Sommers and Chris McKenna) really get who Spider-Man is. Dropping the pithy observations and high-school antics of the first act, No Way Home’s many disparate threads slowly begin to knot into what feels like a perfect origin story for the Web-Head we know and love. It’s unapologetically sincere and sweet at the same time, and Tom Holland gives a stand-out performance as what may well be remembered as the definitive on-screen Peter Parker.
It’s understandable, then, that some of the other performances struggle slightly to keep up, not helped by some surprisingly shonky CGI, even for Marvel standards. It’s hard to remember just how bad Rhys Ifans’ largely forgettable Lizard looked back in 2012, but the design hasn’t aged well regardless, his curiously unaltered voice feeling even more bizarre coming out of what looks like a Goomba from 1993’s Super Mario Bros. The same can be said of Thomas Hayden-Church’s Sandman, and while Jamie Foxx’s Electro is less blue and synthesise-y than in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, the actor is still wasted in a character which struggles to reinvent himself in the limited screen-time assigned to him.
That matters far less than it should, of course, when Alfred Molina and Willem Dafoe are on the call-sheet. Doctor Octopus and his many limbs make a deliciously grouchy return, and though none of his fight sequences come close to the iconic moments of his first outing, his combination of kindly scientist and get-off-my-lawn psychopath is as endearing here as it ever was. As impressive as Molina is, though, even he pales in comparison to the force of nature that is Willem Dafoe’s Norman Osborne, who comfortably threatens to steal the entire movie every time he enters a room and cements himself even more firmly into the All-Time Great Villains list.
As the credits role on Spidey’s latest adventure, however, there’s an odd sense of finality to the whole affair. No Way Home is projected to break every pandemic box office record going when it opens globally this weekend, and, like No Time To Die before it, it feels like a fitting end for an icon of the big screen. It may well be, of course: Tom Holland still hasn’t confirmed whether he’ll don the spandex suit again, and after watching the conclusion to his Home trilogy, it’s not hard to see why he might be having doubts about his future in the MCU. But, if this is the end, then helping save the cinema industry ain’t a bad way to go. It’s not something many blockbusters could claim to do. But if anything can do it, then this spider can.
Verdict
Despite a wobbly first half and some occasionally dodgy CGI, No Way Home delivers fan-pleasing thrills in what is undoubtedly Holland’s finest outing as the webbed crusader, and a fitting tribute to almost twenty years of Spidey on the big screen.
Words by James Harvey
‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ is in UK cinemas now.
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