Spi­der-Man: No Way Home

Sam Raimi’s Spi­der-Man turn 20 next year; a fact which not only makes me feel old­er than ever, but reminds us all just how long cin­e­ma has been obsessed with New York’s friend­ly neigh­bour­hood web­slinger. In the two decades since Tobey Maguire first donned the red-and-blue span­dex, we’ve had eight live-action Spi­der-Man films, mak­ing Peter Park­er among the most pro­lif­ic super­heroes around.

Audi­ences love a scrap­py, charis­mat­ic under­dog, after all, and that has always been part of Spidey’s appeal. Park­er was a broke kid from Queens until he got bit­ten by a radioac­tive arach­nid, and the fact that Sony held the rights to his sto­ry for so long meant he sat at a curi­ous dis­tance from the super­hero movie boom, even after the Mar­vel jug­ger­naut began to take shape with Iron Man in 2008.

Of course, all of that changed when Dis­ney acquired Mar­vel in 2009. Sony held firm, and even­tu­al­ly a deal was struck in 2015 that would allow their prized asset to appear in the MCU, while solo out­ings would be co-pro­duced by the two stu­dios. It proved to be a license to print mon­ey. With Tom Hol­land in the lead role, Spi­der-Man: Home­com­ing made $880 mil­lion; two years lat­er, the sequel took $1.131 bil­lion on a slight­ly small­er budget.

As the box office num­bers con­tin­ue to soar, so too does our hero. In Spi­der-Man: No Way Home, writ­ers Chris McKen­na and Erik Som­mers expand on the idea of the mul­ti­verse first explored in Spi­der-Man: Into the Spi­der-Verse, using this as an excuse to bring back some famil­iar faces from Spidey’s past.

As revealed ear­ly on in the film’s pro­duc­tion, these include Nor­man Osbourne/​The Green Gob­lin (Willem Dafoe) and Dr Otto Octavius/​Doctor Octo­pus (Alfred Moli­na) from the Rai­mi era, and Dr Curt Connors/​Lizard (Rhys Ifans) and Max Dillon/​Electro (Jamie Foxx) from Marc Webb’s Amaz­ing Spi­der-Man films.

That’s a lot of vil­lains to squeeze into a sin­gle film – not to men­tion the oth­er cameos No Way Home has up its sleeve. Yes, the nos­tal­gia dial is cranked up to 11 here, with call-backs to the sev­en films which pre­ced­ed this one. The prob­lem is, it’s tak­en three films for this iter­a­tion of Spi­der-Man to reach the same con­clu­sion as Raimi’s first Spi­der-Man film: Parker’s life is fun­da­men­tal­ly incom­pat­i­ble with the respon­si­bil­i­ties that come with being a superhero.

With his iden­ti­ty hav­ing been revealed to the world at the end of Far From Home, we now see the impact this has had on his friends’ chances of going to col­lege. When Peter seeks help from crotch­ety col­league Dr Strange (Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch), the pair acci­den­tal­ly open a rift which allows par­al­lel uni­vers­es to seep into one anoth­er, bring­ing an assort­ment of peo­ple who know Parker’s iden­ti­ty into the present world.

The lack of char­ac­ter devel­op­ment feels more notice­able this time around, as Peter (once again) strug­gles to choose between his moral duty and per­son­al ful­fil­ment. When Home­com­ing was released, much was made about Spidey’s ori­gin sto­ry being skipped over in favour of throw­ing audi­ences into a world where Peter was already hav­ing super­hero adven­tures. But what was the point if there’s no fur­ther devel­op­ment to be made? It’s grat­ing see­ing the same char­ac­ter repeat­ed­ly fail to learn any lessons or show even a mod­icum of per­son­al growth.

Add in a plot with more holes than Swiss cheese, icon­ic vil­lains bare­ly get­ting a look in, and lack­lus­tre action scenes, and No Way Home feels like a great­est hits pack­age specif­i­cal­ly designed to hit every fan ser­vice but­ton. It doesn’t give us any indi­ca­tion of where this sto­ry is going, or why we should care.