Spider-Man: No Way Home
“Consider the curse sort of broken,” said Benjamin Lee in The Guardian.com. After two previous Spider-Man movie series face-planted in their attempts at third outings, the run that first put Tom Holland in the title credits four years ago has delivered a threequel that “moves with more deftness” than most superhero blockbusters and “will appease a broad fan base this Christmas.” Gone is “the breezy teen movie vibe” of Holland’s two earlier efforts. But that’s a price Marvel and Sony are apparently willing to pay to fuse together many past storylines with a plot that forces
Spidey to battle villains who previously existed in separate universes. Because the animated 2018 film brilliantly employed a similar conceit, said in
this picture “can only look stodgy in comparison.” Still, when Holland’s
Peter Parker is buckling under the pressure of having been revealed as Spider-Man, he asks Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange for a spell that will make the world forget and winds up cracking open the multiverse instead. That brings back a parade of baddies from past Spidey films—“first and most enjoyably, Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus.” It also sparks a fight between Peter and Strange about how best to contain the threat. With Zendaya, Willem Dafoe, Jamie Foxx, and other stars all along for the ride, this superhero adventure becomes, in so many ways, “business as usual,” said in But a fissure in reality that brings together villains from other dimensions can also unite heroes from the past. “When the movie decides to detour into cracked, buddy-comedy territory—that’s when the fun begins.”