Spider-Man - No Way Home

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Spider-Man - No Way Home
USA  2021 Directed by Jon Watts
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Here be big spoilers right from the start... because there’s not much to talk about in this movie other than the central premise/gimmick.

Okay, so first my congratulations to Marvel for getting a film out which has appealed to enough people that it’s literally made billions of dollars in cinema box office in the middle of a pandemic (which still isn’t anywhere over yet... as I’m sure we’ll all find out fairly soon). As for me... well Spider-Man - No Way Home wasn’t a great Marvel movie and it wasn’t a terrible one. It’s about on a par with the last one in the series, Spider-Man - Far From Home (reviewed here) but, at least in this one we see the Spider-Man costume more prominently. In fact we see a number of different costume variants from different versions of, not just the most recent films in which Tom Holland’s Spider-Man has appeared in but also, yeah, spoilers people, we see the versions from the previous two iterations of Columbia’s Spider-Man movies.

So Holland is back alongside Zendaya as MJ (who’s not actually named Mary Jane as everyone had assumed), Jacob Batalon as Ned, Jon Favreau as Happy, Marisa Tomei as Aunt May, Benedict Cumberbatch as Doctor Strange and Benedict Wong as Wong... among a whole host of other regulars from the series. It ties in some of the post-credits scenes in previous movies such as Far From Home and Venom - Let There Be Carnage (reviewed here) and allows them to make more sense because this one is definitely playing around with the idea of multiverses... I guess the studio heads were staggered by the box office of Spider-Man - Into The Spiderverse (reviewed here) and wanted to sort out something similar in a live action version. So J K Simmons returning as J Jonah Jameson at the end of Far From Home makes sense now because this iteration of the character is not the same as the one in the Sam Raimi films... he just happens to look like his multiversal counterpart.

Okay, so what that means, thanks to a screwed up spell when Peter Parker asks Doctor Strange to remedy the problems that Jameson has made for him, is we have various villains... and heroes... from the previous two Spider-Man franchises continuing their story points in the part of the ‘multiverse’ we are familiar with from the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) films. So, yeah, we have Willem Dafoe as The Green Goblin, Alfred Molina as Doctor Octopus, Jamie Foxx as Electro, Thomas Haden Church as The Sandman and Rhys Ifans as The Lizard. Plus, of course, Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield portraying the previous versions of Peter Parker (aka Spider-Man), who are on hand to lend the Tom Holland incarnation some assistance when he loses someone close to him and finds himself in his darkest hour.

And, I will probably get a lot more out of it the second time around but, although I don’t feel all that impressed by this one... which makes absolutely no sense in the way it leaves the characters at the end (I’m hoping they clear up their ‘lack of common sense’ mess in the up and coming Doctor Strange movie)... the film has it’s fair share of up and down moments... more up I am happy to say.

My biggest down moment was Jamie Foxx. I’m sure he’s a great actor and it’s really not his fault that the way his Electro character is written sucks, in both this and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (reviewed here). I used to love that character in the original comics but, yeah, this just isn’t him. However, there were a couple of nice ‘blink and you’ll miss them’ electricity strikes around his head during at least two points which were deliberately reminiscent of the head piece of his costume in the proper 1960s comics at least. I was also somewhat disappointed that Tyne Daley didn’t show up as part of the Damage Control team this time around, as she did in Spider-Man Homecoming (reviewed here) ... which is a shame. Did they drop her from the line-up?

All the other characters were mostly handled well, especially Alfred Molina, injecting the Doctor Octopus role with as much sympathy as he did the first time around in Spider-man 2. Willem Dafoe is also absolutely awesome here and, thankfully, mostly unencumbered by that terrible helmet he wore in Spider-Man (although it does turn up briefly). Thomas Haden Church as Sandman is equally multi-dimensional in terms of his character’s dynamic and reversal in this, like a reflection of what happens with Molina’s character here. The Lizard from The Amazing Spider-Man (reviewed here)  is, perhaps, a little different to how I remembered him, however, especially in the design of the character.

There are also some nice moments with Maguire and Garfield as the two other Spider-Men. One moment which is really emotional is when, when it comes to the MJ character in the film, is when the Garfield version manages to save her from the death he accidentally inflicted on his girlfriend Gwen Stacey in similar circumstances in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Also, there’s a fan pleasing moment when the writers address the issue of whether the mutant Tobey Maguire version of the character shoots webbing from his penis or not... which is something audiences have been asking since his first go in the role in Spider-Man, of course. Yeah, they get a lot of mileage out of his mutant DNA in this one, actually, in terms of the humour of the film.

There’s a large dose of tragedy in the film too. Not just with the death of a major character in the series (yeah, I’m not giving that away too) but with the totally nonsensical ‘how can Peter Parker even get money out of a bank to pay the rent now’ way the ending leaves the central three characters of the MCU Peter Parker, MJ and Ned Leeds in at the film’s conclusion. Now, when I first rumbled they were going to go all multiversal at the end of No Way Home, I was pretty sure they would set this up to eject Spider-Man from the future MCU films... or at least Tom Holland’s iteration of it (there’s a couched reference to Miles Morales in the movie so, it’s obviously on their mind). The ending of the movie definitely sets up a future for the series where Tom Holland’s Spider-Man either does, or perhaps doesn’t, return in future movies. I suspect the answer to that one won’t come soon (and I think it will be a bit of an elephant in the room in the upcoming Doctor Strange And The Multiverse Of Madness too, since it’s pretty much a direct sequel to this one in terms of the set up, at least judging from the trailer used as the second of the post-credits scenes here)... Holland has expressed an interest in not returning so I suspect some hasty salary negotiations are being looked at (or not... Marvel have a track record now for replacing characters with different actors, I believe... Roadie, for example, or Howard Stark and Bruce Banner come to mind).

Ultimately, Spider-Man No Way Home is an entertaining movie for what it is... a big attempt at a multiversal crossover cash grab that, apparently, has certainly succeeded in that. I didn’t hate it and I suspect I’ll grow to like it more over time (if they manage to make sense of their ending in future MCU movies). There are some good bits, there are some clunky bits (“You are AMAZING!"... geddit) but, overall, it’s nice seeing the winning team of Spider-Man and Doctor Strange together again (although Strange is not in it as much as you might think). So, yeah, if you liked the other MCU Spider-Man films, not to mention the previous franchises, you’ll probably have a relatively good time with this one, I would say. I still think Homecoming is the best one in this trilogy, though.