I’ve seen Spider-Man: No Way Home twice now on home video. With a 93% score on Rotten Tomatoes, nearly $2 billion in worldwide box office, and legions of fans declaring that it’s the best Marvel movie ever, Spider-Man: No Way Home isn’t actually very good. It’s entertaining enough, with flashes of brilliance, but it’s over-reliant on nostalgia with a story that doesn’t hang together. And were it not for the pure unadulterated charisma of its leading performers, No Way Home would be an unabashed flop.
You’re going to need to have seen the film for me to talk about why it doesn’t work, so spoilers follow for No Way Home (and, really, every Spider-Man film that came before it). I compared No Way Home to Avengers: Endgame, in that “No Way Home finds itself as the unlikely apogee of the eight Spider-Man films that preceded it.” And I’ve thought about this idea a lot over the last five months, mulling the difference between Endgame (which was built as a climax) and No Way Home (which is merely masquerading as one). I think No Way Home tries very hard to be the next Endgame, especially if you’ve seen every Spider-Man movie in the last twenty years.
If you haven’t, however, I think you must be in the same boat as the little boy a few rows back who shouted, “Mommy, who’s that?” every time the film introduced a new alternate Spider-Man. If you didn’t grow up with Tobey Maguire or Andrew Garfield, the movie doesn’t spend much time getting you to care about these alternate Peter Parkers, instead introducing them with what might as well be a curtain call in which Maguire literally stands still and waves hello. If Maguire and Garfield weren’t so much fun, No Way Home wouldn’t work at all, but they’re clearly enthusiastic about the role.
Compare, though, to something like Into the Spider-Verse, of which No Way Home is a pale imitation. Indeed, although the MCU is skewing multiversal these days, one senses it wouldn’t have leaned this hard into the concept were it not for the success of the animated film. There, the filmmakers found a way to introduce seven different Spider-People into one story, making something that’s both deeply affecting and emotionally engaging. In that way, painting on a blank canvas gave them creative liberty to get wild with the spiders, opening the door to the likes of Spider-Gwen, Spider-Man Noir, and Spider-Gwen. In No Way Home, however, the creativity of the filmmakers extends only to the Spider-Men we’ve already seen before.
This too is true of the villains, where the filmmakers have reassembled the most popular (and contractually available) of Spider-Man’s previous cinematic nemeses. Absent are the likes of Topher Grace’s Venom or Dane DeHaan’s Green Goblin, who didn’t test well with audiences. And while I’ll never complain too loudly about seeing more of Willem Dafoe’s Goblin or Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus, marvelous casting choices in their own right, one senses something of surrender in their inclusion, as if Kevin Feige and the whole Marvel crew are conceding that they will never do as good a job as the casting agents who went before them. Consequently, they seem to have shot themselves in the foot, as it’s now going to prove difficult to reintroduce new iterations of these characters without the wise-cracking Spidey stopping to quip about how he’s met a version of them before. (That’ll get old fast, effectively turning Spider-Man into Deadpool with each hammer blow to the fourth wall.) Into the Spider-Verse had a good bit of fun with this premise, introducing Kathryn Hahn’s Olivia Octavius into the mix as a genderbent riff on Doc Ock, but No Way Home doesn’t leave much room to do that.
It’s really too bad, too, because the Tom Holland Spider-Man films have done yeoman’s work in creating new and compelling versions of Spidey’s rogues’ gallery. In Homecoming, Michael Keaton gave us a working-class Vulture, star of one of the franchise’s best gasp-worthy twists; meanwhile, Jake Gyllenhaal - in what I contend is the best of the three Holland films, Far From Home - finally showed us why a special effects wizard like Mysterio deserved to be ranked among Spidey’s most terrifying enemies. In No Way Home, though, the film isn’t really Holland’s after the first thirty minutes, as he faces no enemies of his own and spends the bulk of the runtime cleaning up the messes of two other Spider-Men.
Then there’s the plainly preposterous notion that this Spider-Man can somehow “cure” the villains, using a magic box he inherited from Tony Stark. Look, I’ve never been particularly bothered by the critique that Tom Holland’s Spider-Man is effectively “Baby Iron Man,” partly because Holland is so charming as Peter Parker and the movies have been so entertaining. Here, though, Holland fairly becomes a guest star in his own movie, slave to references and cameos beyond his ken. Both Molina and Dafoe repeat the catchphrases that made them memes, even though those lines were never catchphrases proper in their own films. Sure, there’s a giddy joy when Dafoe knowingly intones, “Y’know, I’m something of a scientist myself,” but that line has significance only for the audience, and it breaks the illusion of the fourth wall without any of the inventive joy of, say, Doctor Strange’s symphonic duel in The Multiverse of Madness.
That’s what makes Spider-Man a hero - getting in over his head but coming out on top because of his heart. No Way Home is halfway there, but it’s so literal, so artless, that it feels like it was written by a committee of algorithms, substituting true pathos for cameos and reference points, strategically timed to keep an audience’s eyeballs fixed to the sticking point. Where the movie has heart, it’s Holland all the way. He sells the death of Aunt May (with an able assist from Maguire and Garfield), and the movie’s at its level best when he’s cleaning up his own mess. The film’s first half hour is genius, exploring the unique pain of having his identity revealed at the end of Far From Home; I’m even on board with the inclusion of Doctor Strange, casting a failed memory spell to erase the reveal from the global consciousness. It’s perfectly Spidey, digging his own grave, but more to the point, it’s Holland’s dilemma through and through. The film’s first act is squarely about Tom Holland, his problems, and his (bad) solutions. But the film loses steam somewhere around the time that Spider-Man uses Tony Stark’s nanobots to hogtie Doctor Octopus until the plot needs him again, nearly making a hostage situation of poor Alfred Molina’s role in the film.
When No Way Home revives itself, it’s for a standout scene - perhaps the film’s best - in which Spider-Man duels Doctor Strange for another magic box, one that will end the film early by sending its villains back to their home dimensions. It’s pure poppycock, as in the best superhero films can (and should) be, but once again this sequence soars because it’s Holland’s Spidey resolving his own conflicts in a uniquely Spider-Man way, recognizing that Strange’s magic spells rely on geometry - a language Spidey speaks and can readily overcome. Defeating the supernatural with science is one of the quintessential Spidey stories, and to do it with a gem like Benedict Cumberbatch is icing on the eight-legged cake.
Yet in spite of all these problems, all these failures of storytelling and creativity, No Way Home isn’t a catastrophe because of Maguire and Garfield and Holland, Dafoe and Molina and Jamie Foxx, even Cumberbatch and Zendaya and Jacob Batalon - all of them are wielding their infectious star power like a truncheon, bludgeoning us with their charisma and inherent likeability until we end up smiling along with the film. The plot doesn’t make any sense, contradicting its own explicit rules - the spell pulls in any villain who knows Spider-Man’s secret identity (well, Electro doesn’t, but four of the five do); the villains are snatched from the moment of their death (except for Sandman and The Lizard, who didn’t die in their films); while the Spider-Men are pulled from futures (relative to the present day) where they’ve aged along with us but don’t want to talk about the events beyond their films. (Never mind that the Peter Parkers and Lokis of the multiverse all look different, but the Stephen Stranges and Peggy Carters all look alike.)
Amid so many storylines, the most interesting plot - the outing of Peter Parker - is ignored until it’s hand-waved by not one but two deus ex machinas. And No Way Home’s closing moments intimate that now, finally, Tom Holland has become the Spider-Man we know and love, something that is only possible because he too has now seen the other films. Aren’t Spider-Man films great, the movie asks?
And… sure, yes, they are, and I love them just as well as the next guy. But I love them because they say something, something beyond longing nostalgically for the films of twenty years ago. After all, the song doesn’t say that he “does whatever an ouroboros does.” And speaking of that song, how do you do this film without invoking the classic theme at least once? (Composer Michael Giacchino has done it once before already, in Homecoming, and fanedits on YouTube tell me that the movie might have been vastly improved if he’d leaned into the nostalgia factor and channeled the spirit of 1967. Hey, it worked for Danny Elfman in Multiverse of Madness.)
The faintest praise I can give No Way Home is that it’s exactly the movie you expect it is. There aren’t many surprises, and we don’t learn anything new about the characters. It feels cut-and-pasted together from other, better Spider-Man movies - never mind the fact that the film often looks like it was assembled together from post-covid tapings where the actors aren’t ever really on screen together. It’s precisely the movie you think you want to see, which is usually a good indication that the studios have done something wrong. Give the audience what it needs, not what it wants. “Look out,” we might sing while the film derails itself under the weight of nostalgia, “here comes (another) Spider-Man.”
Still, as we said in 2002, thank God for Sam Raimi.
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