Spider-Man: No Way Home - A noisy celebration of two decades of Spidey culled from the multiverse

By Jim Slotek

Rating: B

It’s hard to write about Spider-Man: No Way Home without writing about corporate properties. For that matter, it’s hard to write about it at all without spilling spoiler beans.

Let’s say, delicately, that the Sony/Disney/Marvel powers-that-be saw a huge profit opportunity in Sony’s brilliant and artful 2018 animated film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. In it, an inner-city teen named Miles Morales was the one bitten by a radioactive spider, and the multiverse plot revealed an infinite variety of costumed Spider-Heroes, some but not all of whom were named Peter Parker.

And when universes collide, the opportunity arose for Spider-Folk to assemble and put things back in order.

That was that plot. 

So now that we can have Spider-Man times infinity, consider, if you were a studio head, how might you use it to squeeze box office out of the 20th anniversary of Sam Raimi’s original Spider-Man? Suffice to say, there is some surprise, uncredited casting, and a buddy-movie vibe in the last act.

Spider-Man: No Way Home is a comfort-food present to long-time fans, like a cross-over episode of one or more beloved TV series, with winks, call-backs, trivia, cameos, super-villains and copious destruction. Perhaps the only other super-hero franchise that could pull off something similar would be the Batman/Dark Knight movies.

In a way, the current Spider-Man, Tom Holland has been like a debutante at a prolonged Marvel Cinematic Universe coming-out party. Arguably Marvel’s favourite hero, Spider-Man previously existed in a Sony world where no other Stan Lee-inspired creations existed. But since Sony and Disney reached a billion-dollar détente, he’s been offered a spot on the Avengers, taken under the wing of Tony Stark and taken part in saving the universe from Thanos. 

In this movie, Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is the straw that stirs the multiverse pot. When we left things at the end of the previous film Far From Home, Spidey had defeated the villainous Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal), whose last act was to frame him in public for the villain’s own crimes and utter out loud his secret identity.

So, as No Way Home opens, Peter Parker is a public heel, hounded by federal authorities and the media (In the “Yay” category, J.K. Simmons is back as J. Jonah Jameson, incarnated this time as an online muckraker).

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

Peter’s girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) and best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) are also pariahs by association, and his Aunt May has bricks tossed through her window, forcing her and Peter to move into the home of Stark Industry’s Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau). When the trio of pals find themselves blacklisted from college, Peter visits Dr. Strange whose putative solution is a spell meant to make everyone in the world forget that Peter is Spider-Man. Apparently, there’s a spell for everything.

To say the least, things goes wrong. And soon there are strange new villains wreaking havoc who know Spider-Man is Peter Parker, but who don’t know this Peter Parker. The key bad guys are played, as before, by Willem Dafoe (The Green Goblin), Alfred Molina (Doctor Octopus) and Jamie Foxx (Electro).

To be clear, No Way Home is in no way as elegant a piece of work as Into the Spider-Verse. With all its MacGuffins and noisy clanging, there is so much going on that there’s little room for the regulars and director Jon Watts to do much but keep the plot afloat and moving forward. 

But this isn’t meant to be a story so much as a meta experience. When the past meets the present, the movie is a lot of fun. Listen for the sound of genre fans laughing knowingly at lines like, “You’re being too hard on yourself. You’re an amazing Spider-Man!”

When it stops for tender relationship moments, it practically brings the movie to a halt. (The denouement, with its various heartfelt goodbyes, seems to go on forever).

Spider-Man: No Way Home literally and figuratively ends Peter Parker’s high school years. Which is too bad, because that’s been the part of the current trilogy I’ve found the freshest (Dr. Strange even tosses off a line about M.J. and Ned being Peter’s “Scooby gang.”)

But who knows? In some corner of the multiverse, Peter may be in his freshman year.

Spider-Man: No Way Home. Directed by Jon Watts. Starring Tom Holland, Zendaya and Willem Dafoe. Opens in theatres Friday, December 17.