Spider-Man: No Way Home

Our Review

The fan service event that earned its hysteria. Peter Parker’s secret identity is out, his college hopes are wrecked, and one spell asked of Doctor Strange goes wrong in the worst way: every visitor from every universe who knows Peter Parker is Spider-Man comes pouring through. The premise is a nostalgia machine, and the film has the good sense to treat the returning villains as characters instead of cameos.

Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock and Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin get the most to do, and Dafoe in particular is terrifying, sliding between the dying man and the demon in the same face. The apartment stairwell scene, Norman begging for help from a boy who hates him, is genuinely affecting. The moments the whole theater screamed for belong to the other Spider-Men, and the three way chemistry, three Peters comparing wounds and WEB fluid, turns the hype into something weirdly tender.

The plot is a sieve: the stakes keep shifting, the logic of the cures is handwaved, and Zendaya’s MJ becomes the damsel the series had avoided making her. None of that matters at volume. The finale’s cost, everyone forgetting Peter Parker, resets the character to the street level loner he was always meant to be, and the last scene, a coffee shop pass with no recognition, is a quiet gut punch.

Our score: 8/10. The best pure crowd pleaser of Phase Four.