SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME - With Great Power Comes Great Franchisability

Director: Jon Watts
Writers: Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers

Cast: Tom Holland, Zendaya, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jacob Batalon, Jon Favreau, Jamie Foxx, Willem Dafoe, Alfred Molina, Marisa Tomei, Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, Benedict Wong, Tony Revolori, Angourie Rice, J.K. Simmons

Runtime: 148 mins.

2021

The NEW

J. J. Abrams, who has perhaps done more to influence the last decade of blockbuster cinema than anyone this side of Kevin Feige, did a particularly bad job with Star Trek: Into Darkness. That film, like this one, was the sequel of a reboot. That film, like this one, rehashes the preboot series. That film, like this one, treats the rehash like a reveal even though nobody in their right mind expected otherwise.*

*Star Trek: Into Darkness and Spider-Man: No Way Home also both feature a smug yet perturbed Benedict Cumberbatch.

There is a scene in Star Trek: Into Darkness in which the evil villain kills the father of a main character. She is grief-stricken, she weeps. Thirty seconds later, she is speedwalking down a space hallway spitting exposition. There is no evidence that she has just undergone a traumatic event, nor does her father's death impact anything in the remaining runtime. Drama is the technique of showing growth and change and choice through adversity. If something just happens in a movie and everyone forgets, we don't feel any sort of way about it. Actions hunger for consequence.

A tremendous, existential lack of consequence has plagued the Marvel Cinematic Universe. War Machine is paralyzed? Don't worry, he's got robot legs now.  Tony Stark blows up his suits and retires? Fret not, he actually had plenty of unblown suits left. Hulk has irreconcilable psychic issues? Nay my good man, he reconciled them between movies. Not since "I am Iron Man" buttoned the very first MCU film has it felt like the characters' choices carry any sort of lasting weight. That press conference actually felt dangerous.

The first five minutes of Spider-Man: No Way Home feel dangerous in that same way. The film snaps us to where we left off, with J. Jonah Jameson (J. K. Simmons) bellowing that Spider-Man is none other than Peter Parker! A crowd closes around Peter and MJ and starts to get pushy. They are off to the races, trying desperately to find a safe space in a city of 17 million eyes. This is the best five minutes of the film. One frenetic shot affixes a camera to Peter and MJ as they flee, capturing both the urgency and the sensory overload of webslinging.

All momentum screeches to a halt the first time the film attempts comedy. Peter hides the news of his unmasking from Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) and Happy (Jon Favreau, inexplicably still around). He draws the blinds and awkwardly blocks the TV, and it seems to be supposed to be funny. It's not. The blocking, the pacing, and the calibration of the stakes have fallen to pieces. These new Spider-films are supposed to be modeled after teen comedies, but my god the 'laugh moments' are dire.

It isn't long before any delicious morsels of consequence have evaporated. Enter Cumberbatch as the walking talking Reset Button. Strange is a wizard and can pretty much do anything, which makes IP cross-pollination and retconning quite simple thank you very much. It doesn't make any sense that Strange would help Peter erase his mistakes, nor does it make sense how he does it, but before long we are balls deep in a Spell of Forgetfulness.

Of course this creates a whole gallery of obscure problems for Spider-Man to deal with, but it still feels like the film is retreating from its own given circumstances. If we were to be hypergenerous, we could say that the film's unwillingness to move forward is connected to Peter's unwillingness to enter the next phase of his life. But bad writing with thematic synergy is still bad writing.

Peter's actions here are supposedly motivated out of care for his friends. They don't get into MIT because of their connection to him, and he's trying to fix that. This movie could have been a critique of the "we'll stick together in college!" mentality, but such a critique can't take flight when all of Peter's choices issue from self-centeredness and a colossal sense of entitlement. At no point was I sure that I should be rooting for these characters. Peter is just kind of a dick the whole time, and then magic patches it up. That's his arc.

The OLD

Once Peter unites with Peter and Peter, there is a sequence in which our intrepid heroes, to demonstrate their scienceyness, spend a montage in a lab cooking up 'villain cures.' This appears to be some self-conscious fan service, responding to crusty complaints that Spider-Man doesn't do enough visible science in the movies. Now three Spider-Mans are titrating and centrifuging and swirling beakers of colorful liquid... together! It's like if some producers heard that fans wanted to see Batman do more detective work, so in the next movie they have him walking around an alleyway bent half over looking through an oversized magnifying glass.*

*To be fair, several parts of The Batman are not so far off from this.

The audacity of fan service peaks in Dr. Strange's lair, where the renegade villains from different universes are trapped in display cases like Funko Pops. "You know, I'm something of a scientist myself," Willem Dafoe smirks, in a line of dialogue ripped straight from meme culture. But here's the thing about meme culture-- it reifies moments from art that are compelling or iconic. This simple line regurgitation is meant to get us pointing at the screen with recognition like Leo DiCaprio, but it doesn't feature any of the charisma, or class commentary, or visual verve of the original line delivery. Like so much of No Way Home, it's cannibalism. Necrophilia. And I am still angry all these months later.

It's galling to see a movie without a single idea in its head heralded as a great homage to Spider-Man past and present. To posit that you can cure villainy with minimal interpersonal intervention and about twenty minutes in a lab is a desecration of the corpses of some of cinema's great supervillains, Green Goblin and Doc Ock.** Sam Raimi spent two films artfully drawing out the myriad psychological and socioeconomic factors that led Osborn and Octavius to a fractured psyche. No Way Home believes you can fix that with a serum. It's not only lazy, it's morally and artistically offensive, and it belies a total ignorance of what makes a character memorable.

**The less said about Sandman and Lizard, the better. They are conspicuously CGI and stock footage. The actors never stepped on set.

The closest the film comes to challenging these assumptions is Electro. Jamie Foxx has abandoned his original characterization, instead playing Electro as Jamie-Foxx-but-electric. To advocate against his powers being stolen away, he points out a hypocrisy-- why is this a gift for you, but not for me? Why does it make you heroic and me sick? This thread is immediately dropped, of course, replaced by some pandering lines about Electro assuming Spider-Man would be Black.

For all these reasons and more, Spider-Man: No Way Home is much more Space Jam: A New Legacy than Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse. I know it sounds like I have a chip on my shoulder; it's true that this character has always been precious to me. I had just hoped I'd be seeing a movie rather than an act of mutual masturbation with a corporation.

0.5 / 5  BLOBS