Well-spun tale

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This article was published 18/12/2021 (1551 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Like its title character, who juggles world-saving triumphs with the usual small miseries of adolescence, the latest Spider-Man movie is a nimble balancing act. The third in Tom Holland’s run as the well-intentioned webslinger, Spider-Man: No Way Home is huge and ambitious, jampacked with big-screen spectacle and offering nothing less than a Grand Unified Theory of the Marvel Multiverse. But it also works surprisingly well as a modest, emotionally grounded coming-of-age story, lightened with plenty of self-aware, self-deprecating humour.

Most of all, it’s just enthusiastic, contagious fun.

At the close of 2019’s Spider-Man: Far from Home, we saw that the Tower Bridge disaster had been falsely pinned on Spider-Man, who had also been revealed to the world as Peter Parker.

As an average high school kid from Queens — except for occasionally taking a break from Science Club to go fight with the Avengers — this unmasking turns Peter’s life upside down. Peter approaches Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) for a magical fix, but the “forgetting” spell goes wrong, leaving some holes in the space-time continuum.

Soon, the villains come swarming in from other universes (and, of course, other movies), starting with a wonderfully suave and sinister appearance by Doc Ock (Alfred Molina). This invasion threatens Peter and everyone he loves, including girlfriend MJ (Zendaya), best friend and “guy in the chair” Ned Leeds (Jacob Batalon) and Hot Aunt Mae (Marisa Tomei).

The script is chockfull of familiar Spidey tropes, going back decades, but No Way Home also gets 2021 topical with its riffs on cancel culture, fake news and conspiracy theories. J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons), for example, once the model of a shouty, desk-banging old-school newspaperman, now has an Alex Jones-style internet show, whipping up rage and fear and then shilling dubious dietary supplements.

As Spider-Man moves toward the franchise’s central realization that “with great power comes great responsibility,” Holland radiates a kind of goofy sincerity, though he can’t quite sell the idea of Peter as an overlooked dork. Zendaya is also good as the smart, sarcastic MJ, who is, fortunately, much more than the usual girlfriend sidekick.

The fan service is absolutely off-the-charts, which could be obnoxious, except that even the most blatant, wink-wink call-backs manage to get integrated into the story at hand. It helps, of course, that the film’s manic, crowded intersection of various Marvel heroes and villains has been prepped by the timeline-exploding, parallel-universe antics of the recent Loki series and 2018’s animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

There are points where the conflict seems headed toward the vast and impersonal — with some terrific effects-driven sequences that call up an interdimensional cosmos — but director Jon Watts, who helmed the previous two Holland-Spider-Man outings, and scripters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, who have a background in comedy writing, always bring it back down to a human scale. Even the big climactic showdown is idiosyncratic enough to stand out from the usual Avenger-style sky battles.

Potential bombast is also undercut by deliberate comic juxtapositions between the massive multiverse threat of total annihilation and the more relatable scope of Peter’s teenage anxieties. The story’s initial action, for example, is kicked off when he discovers that Ned and MJ’s university applications have been threatened by their public affiliation with their controversial webslinger friend. In other words, Peter gets Dr. Strange to rearrange the entire world so his friends have a chance to get into MIT.

Now that’s a college admissions scandal.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca