Tom Holland’s Peter Parker returns with a host of familiar faces in a messier yet still mostly entertaining follow-up
There’s a curse of sorts that’s become attached to “the third Spider-Man movie”, one that’s brought us something very bad, something very cancelled and now something very delayed. The poppy thrill of Sam Raimi’s first two instalments sputtered out in catastrophic
fashion with 2007’s much-ridiculed Spider-Man 3, a lucrative yet strangely inept franchise-killer which yanked the director away from the series, unhappy with the finished product and uninterested in trying to course-correct. The next round of reboots then found itself on similar skids after a ho-hum second film led to the creatives involved also disassembling, The Amazing Spider-Man 3 fading into the ether.
Now after a Covid-afflicted shoot and the postponed release that comes with that, we have Spider-Man: No Way Home, a big-budget tentpole tasked with not only proving that a Spidey threequel can work but that, after a rough year, so can a Marvel film, a company suffering from the rare critical and commercial misfire that was Eternals. Is Tom Holland’s web-slinger up to the task? The answer is: mostly yes.