Review of Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) by Deviltherobot — 17 Dec 2021

After the bombshell after credits scene of the last Spiderman movie showing Peter parker's identity revealed I was eagerly waiting a new movie. And now that the movie came out I can sadly say that it did not deliver.

Some aspects of the movie like the acting are very good. Dafoe is easily the best actor here able to portray Norman Osborne in a way very similar to a dementia patient lost in the world. Tobey is able to accurately portray an older wiser Spiderman, and Garfield is able to pull off the pain of losing Gwen well still nearly a decade later. Other aspects like the narrative are not as good. The story is jumbled and kind of stupid. we need to fix all the villains? This is a mind numbingly dumb idea. Furthermore the overarching reveal that the entire MCU Spiderman trilogy is an origin story was a bad choice. There was no reason to essentially yeet MJ and Ned. The movie now seems in retrospect to be a bizzaro soft reboot of the MCU Spiderman series more inline with being an MCU Tobey than its own thing. We also did not need another "with great power comes great responsibility" scene. This was a misstep. Part of why the first MCU Spiderman movie was good was due to that overplayed cliché scene not being in that movie. I don't care for the saying, I have known about this for over 2 decades, lets move on. Something that again the first MCU Spiderman did well, I just assumed Peter in that movie already heard the speech because the audience already has. The fan service while being fun was also overplayed. Felt like an episode of full house with my theater clapping every 3 seconds because of some random reference. Overall I did like it, but it is the worst of the 3 MCU Spiderman movies. If you turn your brain off and get happy at 1000 references then you'll like the movie. I would give it a 3/5 (6.5/10).

Side note:

Aunt May's death was one of the funniest things about the movie. She gets suplexed by the glider, blown up, and then walks around for a few minutes and then dies after the cliché "great power" spiel. I was laughing the entire time.