Spider-Man: No Way Home is a very tangled web

To anyone who’s been exclaiming in the last ten years or so something like, “Again Movie Spider-Man??, “new movie Spider-Man: There’s no way home (in theaters December 17) had a clear answer. It’s three times bigger than Spider-Man’s mythology, summed up Tom HollandThird outing in a red and blue wetsuit with characters from the previous two Spider-Man series. It’s a terrifying device that can only function in an age of comic oversaturation, using Hollywood’s troubling repetition to its own, if small, curious advantage.

In yoking Sam RaimiEarly 2000s trilogy and trilogy Marc Webb pair of adventures from the early 2010s to the current iteration, There is no way home also ties those once-innocent disparate films with the glorious whole of the Marvel machine as it exists today — an act of corporate synergy (between Sony and Disney) so close that people are like to respect it. What else, Marvel’s tractor beam can pull on the hungry monster aboard their ship Borg, to be integrated into the boiling collective?

To be fair, Spider-Man has always been a property of Marvel; he only lives in Sony because the deals are long gone Kevin FeigeDisney-backed content universe conquest. In that sense, There is no way home mostly just a triumph of studio executives agreeing on everything and the actors making their schedules work. I consider it a miracle in itself.

As you may have learned from the movie’s trailers, There is no way home finds Peter Parker (Holland) has been hanging out publicly and trying to live life as someone whose secret has been revealed. So he moved to Hell’s Kitchen and dyed his hair platinum blonde and became a regular employee of Flaming Saddles. I kid, I kid; the powers that are not yet ready to be that Brave. Instead, Peter was turned into Spider-Man, causing many problems for himself and his loved ones. That leads him to an overly reckless Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch, an obsession of people The power of the dog the sky is still in his eyes), whom Peter asks to cast some spell that will make everyone forget that he is Spider-Man.

Of course, it would be wrong to open some kind of portal or not lead to other dimensions — or universes in the movie’s parlance — through which the villains of previous Spider-Man films appear. Going beyond that description would violate the sacred booty oath I made in a secret bunker known only to film critics, so I won’t say anything about it. Will anyone else get out of that hole in space-time?

What I will say is the director Jon Watts handles the great convergence of old and present characteristics with enough capacity to almost sustain the length of film. But there are so many Frankensteining franchises to be done that there really isn’t time for quirks and textures; much of the thrill and sparkle of the previous two Dutch films has been lost. The series’ often winning performances — from the Netherlands, Zendaya, Marisa Tomei and others – suffered the same. Here, the actors are tasked with simply keeping their heads down and holding this unwieldy thing together; The less successful performers will inevitably struggle more.

Holland is at least given some heavier-than-usual material, which he lifts with relative ease like a superhero. Watching him tense up emotionally makes one yearn for him to explore, abandon this all-too-comfortable home for good, and find his fortune elsewhere in the cinematic world. (And, one hopes, with stiffer fares recently two efforts off the Marvel campus.) Holland built a legacy that will live on in the Spider-Man platform; he’d better put it on his mantle now than wear his welcome. Of course, the odds of actually happening are zero.

The actors broke into Holland’s timeline — everyone liked it Alfred Molina (Dr. Octopus, 2004), Willem Dafoe (Green Goblin, 2002), and Jamie Foxx (Electro, 2014) —harmoniously adapting their characters to contemporary housing styles. Dafoe’s sinister tricks add new flavor and drama to this airy world, while Foxx does a hammy, and strangely foreground, recreating a performance where no one else interested for the first time.

And that, I think, is all I’ll say about it, for fear that the chip in my neck will squeak and I’ll be banished to some dimension of hell, where there’s except for one series of Humans. Spider. Better to stay here in us, where there is another journey through space, Doctor Strange and Madness’ Multiverse, is taking place next. And where I will wait patiently, without doubt in vain, the only person I really want to come together: Marisa Tomei, Sally School, and Rosemary Harris sat down to lunch, soaking in an easy afternoon chatting about anything but the dangers of raising nasty boys with sticky fingers.

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