Spider-Man: No Way Home: Film Review

Cast: Tom Holland, Zendaya, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jamie Foxx, Willem Dafoe, JK Simmons, Alfred Molina, Marisa Tomei, Jon Favreau

Director: Jon Watts

Capping off the Home trilogy, and running like some kind of greatest hits package, Tom Holland's Spider-Man: No Way Home has its eyes firmly on crowd-pleasing more than anything.

Picking up directly from the end of Spider-Man: Far From Home with Mysterio revealing Spider-Man's identity to the world via J Jonah Jameson's Alex Jones-esque truth shouter, Peter Parker is facing the reality of being unmasked. Under siege from the press, maligned for the death of Mysterio and with his friends suffering because of their association with the Spider-Man, Parker approaches Doctor Strange (Cumberbatch) to ask for his help.

But when Doctor Strange's magic plan to make things all better is derailed by Parker, the multi-verse splits open and some of Spider-Man's foes from other worlds come bursting through - setting up an epic showdown that will change lives forever.

There's no denying that really Spider-Man: No Way Home is unabashed fan service, wrapped up in a coming of age story for a young superhero.

From secret cameos and Easter eggs aplenty aimed at resetting some of the prior Spider-wrongs, the film's got plenty of ways of ensuring the feel-good factor after Covid derailed everyone's year once again. 

In truth, while this plays greatly to Spider-Man's core audience above anything else, the film also affords Tom Holland a chance to flex some emotional depth throughout, dealing with the consequences of being Spider-Man and the responsibility of being a hero.

Shorn of some of the relative care-free approach of the prior films, there's a bit more heft this time around, even if the film abandons some of that in its second half in favour of fan service and in jokes. But it's also at this point that Spider-Man: No Way Home jettisons some of its propulsiveness, and the film starts to feel a bit stop-start as it hurtles toward its conclusion.

Of the returning pack of villains, Alfred Molina and Willem Dafoe do great work, reminding you why their turns were so iconic early on in differing franchises. There is an argument of familiarity feeling like a lazy approach to end a series, but in truth, the idea of another villainous origin story ending in a CGI-infused smackdown would have derailed the series and robbed the franchise-ender of the emotional edges it was aiming for.

Zendaya's MJ feels a little sidelined in the middle part of the movie, stepping aside to let others take the spotlight, and removing some of the emotional heft of the Spider dilemma. (Cumberbatch's Dr Strange feels more like a villain in this piece, his more po-faced ideology at odds with Holland's more idealistic approach to second chances.)

But with crowd-pleasing action scenes and sequences that are aimed purely at the popcorn-chewing brigade, Spider-Man: No Way Home is perhaps the first Marvel film where the ending lands in uncertainty, and a future for Spider-Man is less guaranteed. 

There's ambition in this webslinger adventure, and it doesn't always succeed in doing much out of its confines, but there's no denying that fans will lap it up, and 2021 will end on a cinematic Spider-man induced high.