Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)

Let me be honest with you: I went into Spider-Man: No Way Home expecting to have a great time, and I came out feeling oddly flat. Not angry, not disappointed exactly, just... underwhelmed. For a film that promised the ultimate multiverse collision, a greatest hits of Spider-Men and villains and crowd-pleasing moments, it turns out that piling on the spectacle doesn't automatically add up to a satisfying film.

The plot is thin. Dangerously thin for something this ambitious. The whole engine of the story relies on emotional beats I never quite felt the film had earned, and that's a problem when the third act asks you to be genuinely gutted. I wasn't. I was watching events unfold rather than feeling them, which is a strange place to be in the middle of what's supposed to be a massive emotional payoff.

Tom Holland is perfectly likeable, but likeable isn't enough here. His Peter Parker has always struck me as a bit too eager, a bit too light, and this film needed a version of the character with real weight to carry it. The earlier incarnations had something his doesn't: a kind of wounded, awkward soulfulness that made you genuinely root for them. Zendaya and Jacob Batalon are fine, warm even, but the script sidelines them fairly quickly. This stops being their story almost as soon as it starts.

Where the film does come alive, genuinely and undeniably, is in its borrowed glory. Tobey Maguire turning up as the original, gangly, soft-hearted Spider-Man is the most joyful thing the film has to offer, and it's not particularly close. He's still the best one. There, I said it. And Willem Dafoe, given actual room to perform rather than just pose, is absolutely magnetic as the Green Goblin. Every scene he's in crackles with a danger and unpredictability the rest of the film can't manufacture. He brings genuine menace, and he earns it through performance rather than CGI. That's the contrast that keeps nagging at me: when the film leans on its legacy casting, it breathes. When it relies on its own constructed drama, it deflates.

Jamie Foxx as Electro, on the other hand, just doesn't work for me. I found him flat and forgettable in a role that needed charisma. He's there, he does things, and then he's gone, and I felt nothing either way.

The action sequences are competent and occasionally dazzling in the way that modern Marvel spectacle tends to be, but there's a kind of numbing quality to it all. The noise is constant, the visuals are busy, and yet so little of it sticks. Compare that to something like Mad Max: Fury Road, where every action beat felt purposeful and kinetic and I could tell you exactly what happened and why it mattered. Here, the set pieces blur into each other.

I don't want to be too harsh, because this isn't a bad film. Fans of the franchise, particularly those with genuine affection for the Raimi and Webb eras, will likely find plenty to love here. The nostalgia is potent enough that it works on an emotional level even when the script doesn't support it. And Dafoe alone is worth something.

But as a standalone story, as an actual film rather than a Marvel event? It's overstuffed, strangely hollow, and curiously lifeless given how much noise it makes. It's a film that works as a highlight reel of someone else's better work. The ghosts of Spider-Men past are what save it, not the story it's trying to tell in the present.

Three stars. Saved by Tobey and Dafoe. Everything else is setup dressed up as spectacle.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 2021  | Watched: 2025-09-14

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