It turned out Spider-Man: No Way Home was the final positive surprise of 2021. After the disappointment of the tired, hacky Black Widow and Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, we’re finally back on track with a movie that not only lives up to the zesty entertainment and visual imagination of the best MCU entries, but it also delivers the kind of genuine laughs that have always been a big part of the Spider-Man franchise. Such laugh-out-loud humor could already be found in the earliest blockbusters: 2002’s Spider-Man often felt like an unabashedly corny rom-com and 2004’s Spider-Man 2 saw director Sam Raimi return to the brand of horror slapstick he had perfected in the cult classics Evil Dead 2, Army of Darkness, and Darkman… and which he later revisited in Drag Me to Hell. (Hell, Raimi’s Spider-Man was clearly the main inspiration for David F. Sandberg’s charming Shazam!) The last couple of films have added a political edge to the proceedings (Far from Home stretched post-truth satire to the limits, spilling over into both post-credits scenes…), which carries over into No Way Home, with its potshots at the culture wars and unobtrusive subtext about asylum policy.
As for the multiverse angle, you’d think it would be a bad idea to try to compete with the most delightful – and funniest – of the recent Spider-Man movies, Into the Spider-Verse, but No Way Home manages to pull it off by carving out its own intertextual niche, engaging with the live-action films that preceded Spidey’s entry into the MCU. What makes this work is that, instead of settling for stunt casting or gratuitous cameos, No Way Home actually mines the pathos and angst from its guest-appearances, ultimately bringing closure to arcs that began almost two decades ago. Plus, on a meta level, the interaction between characters from different continuities inevitably generates further layers of (geeky) gags and ideological readings, since cinematic reboots – particularly of the Spider-Man series – tend to interestingly channel shifts in the cultural and political climate.
Anyway, without further ado, we close the year with a reminder that Spider-Man comics aren’t the only ones that can be awesome:
