Spider-Man: No Way Home sees Tom Holland, Zendaya, Jacob Batalon and director Jon Watts return to the Spiderverse for their third film – and judging by the reviews, it’s the most ambitious one yet.
The film picks up at the end of 2019’s Far from Home, in which Jake Gyllenhaal’s villainous Mysterio told the world that Peter Parker was Spider-Man. Peter turns to fellow Avenger Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) for a spell that will make people forget about his identity. But something goes wrong, opening a portal in which villains from past Spider-Man films emerge, including Jamie Foxx’s Electro, Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus, and Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin.
Despite the tangled web of a plot that sees our friendly neighborhood superhero delve into the confusing multiverse, Spider-Man: No Way Home seems to have won over critics. The film is currently at 99% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, and has a MetaCritic score of 73.
Check out what some top critics have to say about Spider-Man: No Way Home, which opens in theatres Dec. 17.
“What seems at first like pure fan service turns out to be some of the best and by far the most meta stuff Marvel has done, tender and funny and a little bit devastating. (There were audible sobs in the theater at an industry screening.)”
–Entertainment Weekly
“Spider-Man: No Way Home had a lot to live up to. From constant leaks to fans expecting the world at their fingertips, there was a lot to cram into a less than three hour-long movie and while it isn’t perfect, Spider-Man: No Way Home is the ideal third movie for Tom Holland’s Peter Parker and for fans of our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.”
–The Mary Sue
“What I will say is that director Jon Watts handles this grand convergence of properties old and current with enough verve to almost sustain the long run of the film. But there’s so much brand Frankensteining to be done that there’s really no time for quirk and texture; much of the bounce and sparkle of the past two Holland films is lost.”
–Vanity Fair
“Spider-Man: No Way Home is dastardly corporate synergy-in-motion, but also ridiculously fun.”
–The Globe and Mail
“For far too long, the fate of the entire universe has dangled in the balance during Marvel’s many cinematic outings, and while No Way Home goes so far as to add in multiverses and the possibility that the very “fabric of reality” will forever tear, there’s still something charmingly small-scale about this film. It’s personal, and that’s a theme and an idea that is only further hammered home as the film zips through its first act, starts to slow down in its second, and completely nails the whole damn thing by its eye-popping final forty minutes.”
–IndieWire
“No Way Home does use its multiversal mayhem to address the only real problem with the Holland-era webslinger: the Iron Man-ification of the character, in which his already amazing powers keep getting overshadowed by the gadgets given to him by billionaire jerk-hero Tony Stark. This is the least fun of the Watts/Holland pictures by a wide margin (intentionally so, to some extent), but it’s a hell of a lot better than the last Spidey threequel, Sam Raimi’s overstuffed and ill-conceived Spider-Man 3.”
–The Hollywood Reporter
“Spider-Man: No Way Home brings Peter to his biggest screw-up yet, making for a fascinatingly messy film that tries to juggle fan service with a finale for Peter’s high school years.”
–Polygon
“The movie can be ungainly at times, and it’s much too committed to setting up even more craziness to play out in upcoming Marvel product (these aren’t standalone films so much as overloaded episodes, after all), but it provides enough resolution for the past two decades of Spider-Man adventures that audiences who’ve tuned out along the way will be rewarded for giving this one a shot.”
–Variety
“Spider-Man: No Way Home is somehow a perfect harmony of a Saturday morning cartoon and the deep drama that we’ve come to expect from these epics.”
–IGN
“While there’s a heartfelt message at its core and even some shocking twists, Spider-Man: No Way Home is merely satisfactory after being a long-awaited film for many franchise fans with high hopes that their favorite friendly neighborhood hero would soar high. Yet, the film just didn’t swing high enough.”
–Black Girl Nerds
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