Spider-Man: No Way Home holds no surprises. It delivers what’s expected and whether you cry “spoilers” or not, you likely already know exactly what I mean. That’s what the film is hoping for, as its premise—that Peter Parker (Tom Holland) has come so far from his enjoyably low-key Homecoming, his secret identity known thanks to Far From Home, that he must literally toy with fate spanning far beyond his own universe—assumes its audience has a working knowledge and appreciation of two decades of Spider-Man cinema. The multiverse, which supplemented the Oscar-winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse origin story with explosive animated verve, is the only force at work here. It is a massive fan servicing crossover, with the MCU bringing staggeringly little to the fold like a potluck mooch. It is a metatextual collage, which often overshadows the actual text—it’s easy to miss the movie for the Easter eggs. No Way Home is an intriguing case study of corporate collaboration, a self-aware meme machine, and a lackluster movie that understands its hero so well that the disservice stings all the greater.
What director Jon Watts’ trilogy has done better than its Raimi and Webb counterparts is convince us that Peter Parker is a kid. A nervous, charming goodie-goodie with a headful of knowledge and not a lick of sense. So it fits that when he, his girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) and BFF Ned (Jacob Batalon) face problems—blown out of proportion by crippling cases of teen-brain—he’d run off to Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and plead for a magical worldwide memory wipe without really considering consequences or alternatives.
What follows, with characters from past Spidey films getting interdimensionally sucked to this NYC, only really makes sense if you’ve been keeping a keen eye on casting rumors. If so, congratulations: They’re here and shenanigans ensue. If you don’t really care about a fan-fictional Spidey Greatest Hits parade, there’s some other stuff in the movie (it continues trying to convince us that Marisa Tomei’s May and Jon Favreau’s Happy were anything but a long and bad running joke; it lightly engages with bad journalism’s shift from tabloids to InfoWars) but you can tell it’s mostly ceremonial. It’s a movie built for a very specific demographic, growing past what Marvel had previously trained its audience for—having a working knowledge of two dozen movies, knowing what Stan Lee looked like—to a place where knowing about the failings of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is a barrier to entry. It’s a spider’s webcomic what-iffing its way through two and a half hours, the MCU finally giving into what Brianna Zigler called “the sinister serotonin rush one receives upon recognizing something” in her Space Jam: A New Legacy review.
And this is the New Legacy of Spider-Man movies: A film that works hard to do what other films already have, enticing us with parts of movies we’ve already seen. It is, to be fair, much better than Space Jam. Its Spider-Manifesto attempts to use its subject’s film history to move its character forward, delivering familiarity and freshness; /r/Raimimemes and MCU catharsis. Its ambitions frustrate and dazzle.
This franchise-spanning makes No Way Home simultaneously the Watts film with the most overwhelming scope and the loosest and least-controlled script on a granular, moment-to-moment level. There is simply too much to wrangle—too many concepts, too many characters, too many emotional arcs, too many franchise canons—for the film to spend so much time on Apatowian stammering and lackadaisical riffing until scenes mercifully Peter out. Instead of grounding a grand and sprawling corporate synergy, only fully comprehensible if you’ve been watching superheroes for 20 years, its bumbling script means that the only things that really stick with you are those whiteboard strategy meeting Moments—where X gets Y power that will pay off two years later in Z—that the charming Holland films have been mostly free from compared to the rest of the MCU.