‘Home’ Run
That sound you hear is Sony and Marvel executives counting the cash raining down on them for concluding their competent, fan service-y, inoffensive trilogy without raising the ire of Spider-heads.
spider-man: no way home
Director: Jon Watts • Writers: Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, based on the comic by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko
Starring: Tom Holland, Zendaya, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jacob Batalon, Willem Dafoe, Jamie Foxx, Alfred Molina, Marisa Tomei
USA • 2hrs 28mins
Opens Hong Kong Dec 15 • IIA
Grade: B-
Let’s be honest here: Spider-Man: No Way Home is essentially critic proof. It’s good enough to be insulated from charges of ineptitude (it’s not nearly as crappy on the CGI front as parts of Black Widow were earlier this year), and it holds itself together well enough narratively to feel like an authentic conclusion to a series. In the days following the film’s release, COVID or no COVID, it’s made a zillion dollars and Spider-Man nerds are absolutely losing their shit over it. Say anything bad about Spider-Man: No Way Home and you risk the wrath of fanpersons everywhere lobbing accusations of radical liberalism, anti-Marvel bias, racial feminism, hyper-intellectualism, advanced age, or all of the above at you. Alert the media: Sony and Marvel are already hard at work on a fourth entry in the series, because why stop at the natural ending of a story when there’s more cash to root out? Or even when the best Spider-Man movie already exists: Into the Spider-Verse.
Peter, MJ and Ned gaze at a marvel (ho ho ho!) from another dimension. Or something
Whatever. At the risk of great personal safety let’s just say that No Way Home is fine. It’s entertaining enough for many moments in its way-too-long run time. Willem Dafoe is always welcome and Zendaya is turning into a supernova for good reason. Watching Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange, even for a few seconds, rightly spank Peter Parker (Tom Holland) for his stupidity is cathartic — and yes, we know his stupidity is part of the character arc. The writing isn’t exactly Dostoevksy in its layers. But that’s about it. For all its sound and fury, Spider-Man: No Way Home is intensely inconsequential other than for its ability to wrap up a Sony contract and allow Marvel a stronger claim to some of its previously sold IP. That said, the preview audience at our screening went wild at every little MCU nugget that was dropped in, and wild in general. Charlie Cox’s cameo as his Netflix version of Matt Murdock/Daredevil was greeted like a cure for cancer. Clearly, Spider-Man die-hards will be satisfied.
So the story is a simple one. At the end of Spider-Man: Far From Home Quentin Beck/Mysterio exposed Peter’s identity to the world, throwing his life into chaos and scuttling university chances for him as well as for best mate Ned (Jacob Batalon) and girlfriend MJ (Zendaya). Wanting things to go back to the way they were Peter asks Avenger buddy Doctor Strange to cast a spell and have everyone forget he’s Spider-Man. Naturally, being “charmingly awkward” and “sweetly anxious” — for many of us irritating and sucking at life — he throws Strange off his game during the process and the spell opens up the Multiverse to unleash Norman Osborn/Green Goblin (Dafoe), Otto Octavius/Doc Ock (Alfred Molina), Max Dillon/Electro (Jamie Foxx) and a few others culled from Sam Raimi’s landmark original trilogy from 2002-2007, and Marc Webb’s 2012-2014 reboot duology, onto “this” world.
In the spirit of remaining “spoiler-free” for perhaps the year’s worst kept casting secrets, the arrival of the alternate universe villains means our beloved Spidey has to find a way to make things right, without condemning these dudes to sure death at the hands of … Spider-Man. Gee. I wonder how he could do that?
Spider-Man hits the highway to talk to an admissions officer from MIT. He really, really wants to go to MIT
Look, we all know what’s going on here, and writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, and director Jon Watts — all of whom were on the trilogy’s steering committee — know what Spider-Fans want, and to their credit they deliver. But they do so with some convoluted yet bizarrely bland storytelling and forced character progress that detracts from the final product. The central emotional drivers, Peter’s conviction that these villains deserve a chance at redemption, his insecurity with his position as a de facto Avenger, his guilt at derailing MJ and Ned’s lives, are more exhausting than resonant, and ultimately lead to very little beyond a typical Marvellian anti-physics throwdown edited to within and inch of its life, the outcome never in doubt. Watts is perhaps best known for his low-key Cop Car, which demonstrated the pattern his work here would take: great build-up, no follow through. Cleary he and JJ Abrams went to the same school. Watts is working on yet another reboot of Fantastic Four for Sony. I’ll just leave that there.
No Way Home is at its best — SPOILERS — when it brings the various Spider-Men together for a few minutes to talk shop, their identical yet differing relatives, life as a masked vigilante, ageing and so on. The downside of this of course is that Andrew Garfield, while saddled with some of the weaker films, shows off that he is by far the best actor of the trio, unintentionally shaming both Holland and poor Tobey Maguire, who thankfully has the mantle of The First to bandy around. Not far behind are Dafoe and Cumberbatch, effortlessly engaging and injecting the film with a good chunk of whatever nuance it has. Despite being capable of much more, Zendaya’s MJ mostly stands around telling Peter to be careful and moping about her own MIT application. The less said about Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) the better, but it’s not radical to point out that she’s yet another woman to be fridged and that this is getting fucking tiresome. By the time Spidey makes his bittersweet inner peace or some nonsense and dons the classic non-Stark Industries uniform believers will be convinced they’ve been raptured. Everyone else will just be wondering if anything is still open for dinner. DEK
This isn’t a spoiler. Doc Ock was in the trailers