Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B
Special Effects: B+

I guess I have to admit that Marvel Studios has genuinely grown on me in recent years. Somehow, even with mostly the same template for story arc as every other movie before it, lately they’ve managed to offer superhero movies I actually find compelling. This took a bit for me, because I grew so tired of superhero movies in the early 2010s that I mostly blew them off for several years, only bothering with the truly exceptional ones like Black Panther or Thor: Ragnarok or Logan. Even the latter two of those three examples, I never bothered to see in theaters and only discovered their delights later on streamers. After being underwhelmed by the likes of Thor: The Dark World or Avengers: Age of Ultron (what a turd), I was mostly over it. There are better movies to see.

Even as Marvel pulled me back in a bit in more recent years, I never bothered to see Tom Holland’s previous two Spider-Man movies in theaters to review; Homecoming (2017) looked pretty blah to me, and when I finally watched it sometime last year on Disney+, it basically met that expectation. Only a few months ago I finally watched Far From Home (2019), which was a little better but had a seriously dopey villain in Jake Gyllenhaal’s “Mysterio”—a persistent problem in all three of the Spider-Man franchises, to be honest. Only Alfred Molena’s Doctor Octopus from 2004’s Spider-Man 2 has proved to be particularly memorable or easy to swallow.

Enter Spider-Man: No Way Home, which I must say, is worth the wait—and clearly owes its existence, at least in the form it has taken, to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, unquestionably the best Spider-Man movie ever made. I really don’t want to spoil anything, as this movie is absolutely best experienced coming in as cold as possible, with no knowledge of what’s coming—although I suppose it should still be said, you’ll have to have been familiar with not just the Tom Holland films, but all of the Spider-Man movies that came before, in order to appreciate it fully.

Granted, if you care at all about the MCU, you’d have to be living under a rock not to be exposed to any of the rumors long swirling around about this movie. Nevertheless, I will neither confirm nor deny any of it! I will only say that director Jon Watts (Cop Car) and co-writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers (both of whom wrote the previous two Spider-Man movies) offer some genuinely thrilling moments in this film. The audience laps it up, and it’s nice to be in a crowd where that’s happening not just in response to fan service, but to genuinely clever plotting.

Spider-Man: No Way Home may be my favorite Marvel movie that neither tries for overt comedy nor has anything to say about anything outside of its own very American world. Or, in this case, universe. Or universes. It’s still a world as presented within the confines of this film. What I mean to say is, this movie doesn’t go so much for nuance or social commentary (J.K. Simmons’s conspiracy theorist news anchor notwithstanding), but it does featured layered and impressively intricate writing, even if it does feel a bit rushed. Peter Parker’s meeting with Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange, who serves as a vital yet convenient plot device, feels a little too easy as the inciting event for the story here. This is where we get into the sorts of things that made me step away from superhero movies as long as I did, but in this case it’s a minor quibble; the rest of the movie makes up for it.

Because this movie never takes itself too seriously, but neither does it trivialize its own proceedings. It strikes the perfect balance there, and manages to be earnest in only the right places. I actually shed a couple of years near the end, making this the first Marvel movie ever to make me cry. And it was just an emotional goodbye scene. So, either Marvel producers have finally gotten their shit together, or I’m just getting old and soft. It could be both.

I should mention the special effects. There’s nothing groundbreaking happening onscreen in this movie, but at least for the most part it’s convincingly rendered. One of the things that turned me off of Avengers: Age of Ultron was how cartoony it looked, in CGI scenes meant to look real. By and large that doesn’t happen here, although there’s a few moments when the rendering of Spider-Man leaping through the air looks like a transparently CGI effect. Those moments are progressively fewer in these movies, though, and I appreciate that.

I watched Doctor Strange for the first time just last night, in anticipation of this movie, and although I’m glad I did, it’s not necessary to have any appreciation for No Way Home. It just provides context for a couple of details related to that character that might not make total sense in this movie otherwise, but it has no bearing on Spider-Man’s own story. The amount of detail and connected backstory at play in the MCU remains one of my primary complaints about it, and it really is true that if you have never seen the Tobey Maguire or Andrew Garfield films, the experience of this movie will be wildly different, and more of a challenge to appreciate.

If you have, however, Spider-Man: No Way Home ties things together in a way you never thought possible. And this is extraordinarily rare for me, especially for superhero movies, but my advice is to see this as soon as possible, so you can experience its surprises and delights without spoilers. I had a blast at this movie, and it’s been about 17 years since a Spider-Man movie did that for me.

*Spider-Man protects Zendaya from her rabid fans.*

Overall: B+