To anyone who’s exclaimed in the last ten or so years something like, “Another Spider-Man movie??,” the new film Spider-Man: No Way Home has a pithy reply.
Well, to be fair, Spider-Man was always a Marvel property; he just lives at Sony because of deals that long predate Kevin Feige’s Disney-backed conquest of the content cosmos.
It goes wrong, of course, opening some kind of portal or whatnot to other dimensions—or, in the movie’s parlance, universes—through which villains from past Spider-Man films emerge.
But there’s so much brand Frankensteining to be done that there’s really no time for quirk and texture; much of the bounce and sparkle of the past two Holland films is lost.
Watching him stretch his emotive muscles does make one yearn for him to go exploring, shaking off this all too comfortable home for good and seeking his fortune elsewhere in the movie world.
The actors who’ve barged into Holland’s timeline—folks like Alfred Molina —unevenly adapt their characters to the house style of the day.
And where I will patiently await, no doubt in vain, the only coming-together I really want: Marisa Tomei, Sally Field, and Rosemary Harris sitting down to lunch, soaking in an easy afternoon of conversation about anything but the perils of raising pesky boys with sticky fingers.
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