Spider-Man: No Way Home *spoilers from post 185*

I wouldn’t agree Raimi plays everything seriously, there’s a Jameson scene which is an extended riff about Doc Ock’s name (and a Dr Strange wink towards the audience). I think maybe the difference is a lot of the comedy of the films is channelled through that one larger than life character (and a Simmons’ pitch perfect performance), rather than just cheap wisecracks.

I do agree about Raimi’s chances within the MCU though. Im curious but not necessarily confident. I mean his last film was nearly ten years ago and a bit of a dumpster fire. But he is maybe the only director to truly capture the vibe and look of an old fashioned comic book, so we’ll see what he comes up with.

I’d always be immediately suspicious of films that are apparently so full of ‘surprises’ that you have to hide them from critics. Just suggests to me (rightly or wrongly) that the film doesn’t have much going for it beyond said ‘surprises’ - surprises that’ll immediately be known after the first public screening anyway.

Credit where credit is due: this is probably the most enjoyable and substantial of the Spider-Man MCU films. And extra credit where extra credit is due: after the miserable fan service ouroboros that was Ghostbusters Afterlife, this handles its callbacks better. I mean, it’s still a fan service ouroboros, but at least it’s not miserable. A plot is built around all these familiar faces, and almost all of them have multiple scenes and at least something to do (even if it’s clear the actors behind two particular returning, CG-heavy villains probably had about 2 hours total on an actual set / recording booth). Holland and Zendaya are too old to pass for high schoolers at this stage, but they do have actual chemistry which helps sets the stakes here.

The problem with it is the same as most MCU films: direction. Not plot direction - the actual nuts and bolts filmmaking. It’s perhaps even more pronounced here that we’re calling back to the Raimi Spider-Man films. While I still much prefer that particular take on Spidey than the wise-cracking high schooler here, it was ultimately Raimi’s vibrant direction that made those films the best live action Marvel films to date. Watts, alas, is no Raimi. While there’s more emotional and character heft here than the previous two films, it’s all blandly directed with no particular spark. The action is flat, the staging insipid, and the whole thing cloaked in ugly CG to the point where I often wondered how many of the actors were even in the same place. Even at the end, there was nice little visual moments to cut to black on, but even those were followed by more redundant epilogues. There’s just no oomph to the filmmaking. At least it’s coherent, which is more than I was expecting from a film with so many moving parts and extended universe nonsense.

Still: at least it delivers what it teased it would. It doesn’t deliver anything more than that really (it’s basically as straightforward a take on a ‘multiverse’ as you could imagine), and certainly nothing to match the joyous aesthetic ingenuity of Into The Spiderverse. But it’s undeniably good to see a lot of these characters and actors back, even relatively briefly. It has the same problems as many MCU films - there’s one ‘witty’ banter scene near the big, boring action climax that goes on for far, far longer than it needs to, and most of the jokes land flat. The constant winking and nodding at the audience frequently gets too much. And yes we’re covering the same thematic and character ground yet again. But as an avalanche of all things Cinematic Spider-Man it does its job, even if it does unavoidably serve as a reminder of how much better these kinds of films could be not so long ago.