"Spider-Man: No Way Home" (2021) Review

It’s been a long time since I really liked a Marvel Cinematic Universe film.

My personal relationship with the MCU films has become a bit fraught over the years. The sheer scale of the project has become overwhelming, with Spider-Man: No Way Home technically being the 27th film released in this series, and that’s not including the Disney+ shows of the last year or so. By the sheer law of averages and the pace at which these films get released, there can really only be so many good or even great movies in the bunch, with many feeling very average or unremarkable.

Thankfully, Spider-Man: No Way Home is definitely good. It doesn’t hang with my favorite films in the series (films like Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Thor: Ragnarok, Avengers: Endgame, and so on), but it manages to be easily my favorite film of the Tom Holland Spider-Man trilogy, and just as easily my favorite film in the MCU since Endgame. Even as the film’s many crossover jokes and lengthy 148-minute runtime sink in, there’s a real story being told with Spider-Man here, and a surprisingly dark one too.

Look, if you haven’t been keeping up with these movies, I don’t blame you (again, this is the 27th of this series), but I’m not going to explain everything that led up to this film, especially since it begins seconds after the film Spider-Man: Far From Home’s post-credits scene ends. Quentin Beck, A.K.A. Mysterio, has revealed Spider-Man’s identity to the world. Everyone knows that Peter Parker (Tom Holland) is Spider-Man, and this revelation ends up causing chaos for everyone around him.

His best friends, MJ (Zendaya) and Ned (Jacob Batalon) stand beside him to their own peril. His Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) is still trying to instill as many good lessons in Peter as she can as his personal life crumbles. His desperation leads him to the door of Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), who tries to cast a spell to make the world forget that Peter Parker is Spider-Man. Peter accidentally botches the spell, and strange new villains begin to appear, all mostly intent on hunting him, and all confused by the fact that they don’t think he looks like the Peter Parker they knew…

There’s an elephant in the room with this movie, which is that it appears to be pulling at least the concept of its story from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (multiverses and multiple characters pulled from other universes, and so on). Simply put, Into the Spider-Verse is not only the best Spider-Man movie, it’s one of the best superhero movies of the decade, and I can’t pretend that I didn’t think that Spider-Man: No Way Home pulling these plot points was a fool’s errand. There is no live-action movie that’s going to top Into the Spider-Verse, and that definitely ended up being true here. As much as I enjoyed No Way Home, it never hits the unbelievable highs of the movie it’s pulling from.

However, No Way Home very wisely tells a completely different kind of story from Into the Spider-Verse, and the comparisons are a lot more superficial as a result. No Way Home’s story is about the unending cascade of consequences that come from trying to undo the past, and how much you can not only protect the ones you love, but how much you have to give up to in order to truly protect them.

For all of the trailers focusing on the return of Spider-Man villains from other films like Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), Doc Ock (Alfred Molina), Sandman (Thomas Haden Church), Lizard (Rhys Ifans), and Electro (Jamie Foxx), the film centers all of the crossover madness on how it personally changes the life of this universe’s version of Peter Parker. It’s the right way to go about making this sort of movie because when it eventually decides to introduce consequences that can’t be undone, they hit. Hard.

Tom Holland feels like he was bred in a chamber to specifically play a young Peter Parker, and this is his best work in the role to date. He is carrying a lot of different emotional tones on his shoulders, and when the film hits its darkest material, Holland only makes it hit even harder. The only thing I can even remotely fault him for is some of his joke deliveries, but that’s usually more the fault of the script and the quality of the writing.

One of the now long-standing problems I have with the MCU is that it feels like a mathematically-required number of jokes per every ten minutes of screentime are crammed into their films, and No Way Home isn’t an exception. There are some comedy scenes, particularly in the back half of the film, that all feel like they should be about two minutes shorter each. I wish they’d just picked the best ones and moved on, especially because a lot of the jokes are pretty hilarious.

There are many more highlights than low spots to talk about though. The highlights really end up being Alfred Molina as Doc Ock and Willem Dafoe as Green Goblin. The other actors playing villains have scattered moments of drama and humor that work, but Molina and Dafoe simply are operating at a different level here. Any scenes with them that threaten to be cheesy or corny don’t become either of those things through their performances alone. As many jokes as Molina made about doing this movie for a nice check, he didn’t cash it and act bored. He’s playing Otto Octavius as a real human being trapped by a machine mind, and Dafoe’s version of Osborn feels like it walked right out of the 2002 film with a surprising amount of continuity.

Now let me be clear: As much as I enjoy this movie and appreciate that they didn’t make the whole thing fan service, there’s still a lot of fan service. They are really hoping that you remember the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies fondly, and a lot of the previously mentioned deluge of jokes centers around this aspect of the film. Again, most of it lands, but some of it is clumsy. It might not come as a shock that the clumsiest parts involve Lizard, Electro, and Sandman, mostly because the movie each character comes from is lackluster in its own way. There’s only so much you can do for them.

You may be surprised that I haven’t really talked about Benedict Cumberbatch that much as Doctor Strange, but there’s just not much to talk about. Some good scenes scattered here and there, but he’s definitely a supporting character in this story. I don’t think anyone was expecting this to be a movie where Doctor Strange was a co-lead, but he definitely gets sidelined the most here.

The part of this movie that I think is fantastic though is how it ends. Obviously, I’m not going to go into specifics, but this film did something I thought I was beyond. It made me excited about the future of the MCU in some way, and while I won’t be watching all of these movies in theaters (I’ve skipped the last four of these in theaters entirely), I would definitely watch another Tom Holland Spider-Man film after this one.

There’s a lot more I’d love to talk about, but the film hasn’t been out nearly long enough to talk about those other aspects of the film and I don’t want hardcore fans of this franchise screaming at me. Overall, if you’re already into the MCU, you’ve probably already watched this. But if you’re on the fence about the MCU and are still curious about some of the movies, I heartily recommend giving this movie a shot. I went in with a sense of obligation and walked out genuinely impressed with most of the movie on the whole, and it ended up being my favorite of the “Spider-Man Home” trilogy.

(I’m not sure what else to call it? The Jon Watts trilogy? The Tom Holland trilogy? The MCU Spider-Man trilogy? Whatever.)

Oh! One last thing, I greatly appreciate that this film starts with the song “I Zimbra” by Talking Heads. I guess it’s thematically relevant to the scene, but I more appreciate it as just a big fan of that song, and I was not expecting to hear it in a Marvel movie anytime soon.