- UK release: December 2021
- Director: Jon Watts · Writers: Chris McKenna; Erik Sommers
- Studio / distributor: Columbia Pictures; Marvel Studios; Pascal Pictures (Sony)
- Genre: Superhero multiverse adventure · Runtime: 148 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- Main cast: Tom Holland (The Impossible, Spider-Man: Homecoming) as Peter Parker / Spider-Man; Zendaya (The Greatest Showman, Dune) as MJ; Benedict Cumberbatch (The Imitation Game, Doctor Strange) as Doctor Strange; Willem Dafoe (Spider-Man, The Lighthouse) as Norman Osborn / Green Goblin
- Rotten Tomatoes: 93% critics / 98% audience · My rating: 8.5 / 10
The Marvel machine has been threatening a multiverse for a couple of years now, mostly as a marketing word, and No Way Home is the first film where the idea earns its keep rather than just teasing the next one. It arrives at the end of Jon Watts’s trilogy, after the smaller, John Hughes-flavoured Homecoming and the holiday-postcard Far From Home, and it has a problem none of them did: the last film ended by telling the entire world that Peter Parker is Spider-Man. That cliffhanger turns out to be the engine for the whole thing, and the surprise is how much genuine feeling the film wrings from a premise that began as fan-convention wish-fulfilment.
The setup
Peter Parker (Tom Holland) is eighteen, unmasked, and the most famous and most hated boy in New York. His friends MJ and Ned are caught in the blast radius of his exposure, college doors are closing on all three of them, and Peter does what any overwhelmed teenager with a sorcerer on speed dial would do: he asks Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to make everyone forget. The spell goes wrong in the way spells always do, and the seams between universes split open. Through the gaps come people who already know exactly who Spider-Man is, because in their world they fought a different one. I will keep the rest behind the curtain, because half the pleasure of this film is watching who steps through the next portal.
The cast
Holland has spent two films being the most likeable Spider-Man on screen and the least burdened, and here he finally carries the weight that the role has always promised. The cockiness gets stripped away scene by scene, and by the closing act he is doing the heaviest dramatic work of his run. Zendaya’s MJ is more than the love interest the part could have been, dry and watchful and quietly braver than Peter. Cumberbatch plays Strange as an exasperated adult stuck babysitting a teenager who keeps rewriting reality, and the friction is funnier than it has any right to be. The returning villains are the casting coup, and Willem Dafoe in particular treats the Green Goblin not as nostalgia but as a genuine threat, gleeful and frightening in equal measure. He is the best thing in the film whenever he is on screen.
The craft
Watts has always been a sturdy rather than a flashy director, and that steadiness pays off when the plot threatens to fly apart. The action is legible, which is rarer than it should be in this genre; you can follow a fight across a collapsing building and always know where everyone is. Michael Giacchino’s score quietly reaches back to themes the audience has been carrying for two decades, and the film uses that memory rather than just sampling it. The middle act sags a little under the sheer admin of managing so many characters, and a couple of the digital set-pieces have the weightless gloss the studio cannot seem to shake. But the final stretch lands its emotional punches cleanly, and the design never loses sight of the small human story buried under the spectacle.
How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is Avengers: Endgame, another film that runs on the audience’s accumulated history, and No Way Home is the more disciplined of the two: tighter, more personal, less concerned with closing ledgers. It is not as formally inventive as Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which did the multiverse as art rather than event, and it does not match the clean two-hander tragedy of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, still the high bar for the character. What it does, and does better than almost any film of its kind, is make a crossover feel like it costs the hero something. The nostalgia is the bait; the consequences are the meal.
Critics versus the rest of us
The split here is narrow and revealing. Critics sit at 93%, warm but with the usual reservation that the film leans hard on fan service and franchise memory. Audiences are at a near-unheard-of 98%, because for them the fan service is the gift, not the flaw. Both are right. If you have no history with these characters, a good deal of the film’s charge simply will not reach you, and the structure will look like a clever delivery system for cameos. If you do have that history, it plays like a reward two decades in the making. I land closer to the audience, with the critic’s caveat noted and filed.
Verdict
This is a film built almost entirely on goodwill the franchise has banked over twenty years, and it knows it, which is the difference between cynicism and craft. It would be nothing without the memory it draws on; with it, it is the most emotionally satisfying entry in this Spider-Man run and one of the few Marvel films of late that actually lets a choice hurt. The plumbing of the multiverse plot creaks, the studio gloss flattens a scene or two, and a newcomer will get less from it than I did. None of that stops it being enormously enjoyable and the kind of thing I will happily put on again. 8.5⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now, in standard, IMAX and 3D. A disc and digital release will follow in the new year.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: No Way Home became one of the highest-grossing films of its era and effectively rehabilitated the multiverse as a workable big-screen idea, which the MCU then chased through Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) and beyond. Tom Holland’s Peter returns in a fourth film, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, picking up the deliberately humbled status quo this one leaves him in. It now streams on Disney+ in most regions and is widely available on 4K disc and digital, with the extended “More Fun Stuff” cut released theatrically the following year.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12A by the BBFC for moderate violence, threat. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: Characters battle using fantastical powers and tech, and there are scenes of hand-to-hand combat which feature heavy punches.
Threat and horror: Scenes include people fleeing from explosions, falling from heights, and brief jump scares as different villains appear.
Flashing/flickering lights: This work contains flashing images which may affect viewers who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy.
Additional issues: There are mild sex references. Language is largely mild (‘shit’, ‘bastard’, ‘ass’) or very mild (‘God’, ‘hell’, ‘damn’, ‘screwed’, ‘moron’). There is an incomplete use of “What the f-”, and a man carries a mug which has a pictorial play on strong language. There is also an undetailed drug reference.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
