Spider-Man: No Way Home Review

 Spider-Man: No Way Home review

Spider-Man: No Way Home is the movie that I need this summer to make up for the garbage we got a month ago.

While not perfect by any means, it certainly delivers on the promise of Spidey himself and brings us one step closer to Spider-Man 4, which I’ll happily welcome. Although he made his debut in last year’s Captain America: Civil War, Spider-Man: No Way Home is Peter Parker’s first solo outing with the title hero to the fore. He’s struggling with a new job and living in Queens with his Aunt May. His teenage troubles are far behind him, but the first out-of-school issue of Parker’s life begins with the discovery of the Scorpion in Central Park. But this isn’t just any serial criminal. He’s insane, as the title makes clear, and Parker vows to track him down no matter the risk. That starts with what’s basically a mass collection of potential stories – we’re told “how” Parker finds the Scorpion, but we don’t get the details until Parker and Doc Ock later have a knock-down, drag-out fight. Fortunately, there’s enough of Spider-Man to cover all of that, with Andrew Garfield finally getting to try out his comic-book-version of a sarcastic little pout. It’s not the smoothest transition in the world, but his mixture of pop culture knowledge and cool sarcasm sells it well enough. Garfield has his moments of wry sweetness, but it mostly ends up sounding like Andrew Garfield. That’s fine, because he’s delivering a tone that suits the character perfectly – unshakable self-confidence, the confidence to know that there’s always another way and just the right amount of cheekiness to help balance the scales of this realist superhero. I’ve always wondered how Spider-Man: Homecoming would handle Peter Parker as the leader of his own school. After he “retires” his mentor and best friend Harry Osborn, he’s left to essentially start everything over. Luckily, this new incarnation of the school is just as crummy as its other name implies: the Midtown High School for Super Villains. A more appropriate name would have been the Midtown High School for School-Less Super Villains, but we don’t get to see that school thanks to a now-deleted post-credits sequence that included yet another post-credits scene. The villain is well-drawn, though.

vegamovi is most popular

vegamovi 

“A teenager is no match for a 48-year-old man,” we’re told early on, and it’s true. There’s no action set piece that feels outlandish or big enough to indicate how all these villains are going to get out of Midtown High alive. The only thing you get is a steady stream of one-liners that sort of hint at the right amount of action to be shoehorned in there, while also spelling out the most important lesson of Spider-Man: they should be more direct in their message. The villains (and Spider-Man) all have something to say, but they keep it short and sweet. The end result is a pretty straight line through the movie that leaves no doubt as to its message. The majority of the movie isn’t about Peter Parker at all, but rather the teenage angst of his classmates, which is unfortunately still presented as a joke. The story is sometimes a little too reliant on beats and traps that appear to be at the heart of the comics. While Peter Parker’s powers are in full effect, he is in the same range as Iron Man and Wolverine, which makes sense. But Peter Parker and the audience need more than that, so they expect the same sorts of moments, like “it’s on” or “I’m gonna kick your ass” or just “brutal.” On-the-nose moments like these actually don’t happen often, but they’re still present, and they run parallel to some of the early moments when Peter Parker is desperately trying to get his powers under control. That’s a sensible way to structure things, because I understand Parker’s motivations, but these scenes lose their edge in the context of the rest of the movie. It’s also a little too reliant on that montage of Spider-Man punching a guy in a “nice suit,” which will undoubtedly annoy the hell out of people.