Spider-Man: No Way Home review: Peter Parker’s biggest mess ever

The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s latest version of Spider-Man/Peter Parker has provided the greatest entertainment. While every cinematic Spider-Man story has picked up with the hero in high school, Tom Holland’s take on the character is the one most firmly planted in the teenage experience. 2017’s Spider-Man Homecoming and 2019’s Spider-Man is Far From Home show a world where aliens invade and supersoldiers wage war, but it’s filtered through the eyes of a kid from Queens who’s strong enough to fight alongside the older heroes, but not yet wise enough to keep from getting in over his head. The mistakes. And Spider-Man has no way home brings Peter to his biggest screwup yet, making for a fascinatingly messy film that tries to juggle fan service with a finale for Peter’s high-school years.

Fan service can be a huge plus. You can’t go home!Without spoilers, it’s hard to speak of the plot without giving away too much. There’s more to it than the trailer gets into, and revealing any details would deflate the thrills. Ideally, that wouldn’t matter much; the story of Peter Parker’s final days as a high-schooler is what should make for a satisfying film. However, You can’t go home! is a trilogy-capper — often fun, occasionally rough — built on stuff Sony, Marvel Studios, and diehard fans would rather we didn’t talk about yet. So we’ll tread lightly.

[Ed. note: Light spoilers for No Way Home follow.]

Spider-Man has no way home The film opens with Peter Parker. The ending ends immediately. Spider-Man is Far from Home, as J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons) — re-imagined here as an InfoWars-style provocateur with a YouTube channel — both frames Spider-Man for the attack Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal) launched on London, and reveals that Peter Parker is the boy behind the mask.

Photo: Matt Kennedy/Sony Pictures

You can’t go home! This momentum immediately drives Peter Parker, and he has just minutes to decide how to make it as the most popular teenager on Earth. There’s a wonderfully manic energy to You can’t go home!’s opening moments, as Peter panics and tries to swing home safely with his girlfriend MJ (Zendaya), amid a sudden media blitz. The scene transitions to the claustrophobic footage of him in an apartment he shared with Aunt May (Marisa Tomei), trying to get the news out to her before they break into their living area.

Peter’s sudden fame can have all kinds of adverse consequences, including the loss of their privacy. Thanks to Jameson broadcasting Mysterio’s efforts to frame Peter, he and his friends are seen as potentially party to a terrorist attack, which brings them under scrutiny from law enforcement and jeopardizes their futures. Colleges aren’t interested in enrolling vigilantes and accomplices.

Peter decides this price is too steep for his friends and turns to Doctor Strange, Benedict Cumberbatch, for assistance. Doctor Strange asks for a spell that would make all the people forget Peter is Spider-Man. Peter begins to second-guess the procedure, which causes the universe to fracture and brings villains from past cinematic portrayals of Spider-Man into this MCU.

Image: Sony Pictures

Among them are Norman Osborn/The Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe)And Dr. Otto Octavius (Alfred Molina) from Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2, and Electro (Jamie Foxx) from Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2,. Naturally, You can’t go home!’s premise leaves room for viewers to speculate who else might also join them, but the three prominently featured in the film’s promotional material are also key to the movie’s narrative arc.

After such an exulsive and character-first opening the narrative contortions follow. You can’t go home!’s script needs to make its central monster mash happen slows the story down considerably. However, Peter’s mess is evident despite the magic and multiversal terminology. He now has to tidy it all up and get these bad boys back where they belong.

A story such as this is dangerous because it’s easy to let go of spectacle and allow the movie to be carried along by the superficial thrill of breaking down franchise lines. You can’t go home! doesn’t really dodge this problem — you could also call it Spider-Man fan service ahoy! — but screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers make a valiant effort to give the movie a beating heart by giving Peter a more humanistic goal. When Peter learns that these invading villains were plucked from their universes before fatal battles with their respective Spider-Men, he’s unwilling to send them back to their deaths, and instead tries to find a way to “cure” them of their supervillain transformations, and send them back with second chances at good lives.

Image: Sony Pictures

It’s a fitting goal for the Marvel Cinematic Universe version of Spider-Man, who’s always been characterized by noble naïveté and a stubborn insistence that he can do a good thing, even when others reasonably tell him he might make things worse. He has good foils in these three major villains. Each one fits an archetype. Max Dillon/Electro describes a greedy, simple crook. Otto Octavius was the role model who fell prey to hubris. Norman Osborn, too? With split personalities, he’s both a guiding light and the devil. Dafoe, bringing every fiber of his being to the role, becomes a grinning face of evil that dares Peter to think that holding onto his moral compass is a fool’s errand, one that’s worthless against someone who doesn’t care for morals.

You can’t go home!’s story is also a franchise flex. There is no better way to prove that Spider-Man’s MCU Spider-Man is the ultimate version than having him be a part of the MCU Spider-Man. Failure his predecessors’ greatest foes, but also The cure them? (That’s putting aside the thorny question — which You can’t go home! has zero interest in — of whether evil is a thing that can be cured.)

You can’t go home!It has some visual surprises to add to the story. The usual effects-driven spectacle we’ve come to expect from the MCU rises to the epic occasion; a brawl between Strange and Spidey in the kaleidoscopic Mirror Dimension from Doctor StrangeThis is simply amazing. Other times, like the initial confrontation between Octavius & Spider-Man during a jam in traffic, the action can be merely functional. Some of the fights are surprisingly physical and brutal, however, balancing the weightlessness of computer-generated effects with a couple of slugfests that feel very real, as Peter, unmasked, brawls through a tight hallway, or throws himself into a confrontation that’s pretty much just a fistfight at dawn.

Photo: Matt Kennedy/Sony Pictures

You will be more aggressive You can’t go home!’s action comes part and parcel with the film’s darker tone, which puts Peter through the wringer emotionally as well as physically. Tom Holland throws his heart into it, anchored by a smaller supporting cast than usual — effectively just his best friend Ned Leeds (Jacob Batalon), girlfriend MJ, and Aunt May. Peter Parker is the Peter Parker. Homecoming trilogy has fallen often and hard, but he’s always done so with an Avengers-adjacent net to catch him. In You can’t go home!That net was taken from him and he is now able to stand alone without all the Stark-esque enthusiasm.

It is all wrong. You can’t go home!’s brightest spots can fully free the MCU’s take on Spider-Man from its deepest flaws: It’s still a film that’s beholden to other films. Director Jon Watts gave his Spider-Man trilogy a subtle-yet-vital distinction, setting them in a slightly brighter and lighter world than other MCU films, and leaving room for Peter’s Midtown High classmates and teachers to steal multiple scenes. This, however, was offset by Tony Stark’s presence continually pulling Peter away from that grounded world, first as a distant surrogate father in HomecomingAnd then, as a legacy to be lived up to Far away from home. Stark is, thankfully, not part of You can’t go home!’s equation, and Stephen Strange isn’t meant to take his place. The MCU Peter Parker is being pitted against Peter Parker’s villains. You can’t go home! continues the trilogy’s bothersome trend of the filmmakers leaning on other movies to provide them with stakes and shortcuts to character growth. It’s a trilogy of films trading on stolen valor.

This is ultimately the tragedy of Spider-Man’s Tom Holland era. He is so close it hurts to be Peter Parker. He’s young, earnest, and the absolute sweetest screw-up imaginable, one who Always, alwaysHe wants to do right, but he doesn’t know what it might look like. He is constantly lost in a machine that is bigger than him and which threatens to swallow his whole. He is In Spider-Man has no way home, they call that threat “the multiverse.” But in our universe, he’s just a victim of how movies are made now.

Spider-Man has no way homeFilm premieres will be held in theatres this Friday, Dec. 17.