I’m probably one of the last people to see this movie, which has been out for almost two months. But at least this way I can comment freely without fear of giving anything away about this movie because you’ve all seen it, right? Nevertheless, just in case, I’m still issuing a spoiler alert for this review. If you haven’t yet watched Spider-Man: No Way Home and still intend to, please skip over the rest of my post. Now that you’ve been warned, let’s jump right in.

After an amazing start to the Tom Holland era with Homecoming, and a pretty good middle film with Far From Home, No Way Home totally sticks the landing and wraps up this trilogy nicely. This movie was one of the most clever super-hero movies that I’ve ever seen, and the execution was great. The inciting incident (where Spider-Man and everyone he loves gets their lives stomped on by having his secret identity revealed) is pretty mediocre as a plot device, but thankfully that’s not important as it’s just a deux ex machina excuse for Doctor Strange (Yay, MCU crossovers!) to do a spell that goes wrong and conveniently causes the multi-verses to bleed into each other. Granted, the “Spider-Verse” concept of bringing together multiple variants of Spider-Man has already been done in the incredible Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and the idea that each movie franchise (i.e. the Tobey Maguire movies vs the Andrew Garfield movies vs the Tom Holland movies) are a separate universe that is part of a shared multi-verse has also been done by The CW and DC Comics’ “Arrowverse” shows. However, it’s still a wonderful concept and still feels fresh when we see Doctor Octopus, as played by Alfred Molina again, confronting Spider-Man (as played by Tom Holland rather than Tobey Maguire). I was giddy with how much that felt like the perfect way of pulling off this kind of trick in the movies. Unlike Into the Spider-Verse, which introduced us to a whole slew of unfamiliar Spider-men (and women) from different realities, here we get to see characters that we (as faithful fans) already know. It’s fun to be in on the trick, right?

Apart from the clever execution of the multi-verse concept, this movie also did an excellent job with the characters. The actors all gave nice performances and were very comfortable in their roles, especially Holland, who is a master of bashful-yet-jumpy teenage charm. Despite multiple universes and multiple villains invading their lives, Peter Parker and his buddies still had time for some good character moments, dealing with big changes in their lives and trying to keep up and grow up … and handle loss. At first I was a bit disappointed in Peter Parker’s idealism. It seemed to my jaded, middle-age mind to be naive for him to want to prevent the potentially deadly fates of the villains if they returned to their home realities. But I was happy to be proven wrong and the idealism worked well, not only because of the success of curing the villains, but it validated the incredibly high stakes and the loss of Aunt May. She couldn’t die for nothing.

Lastly, I thought that having the three Spider-Man actors return and bring their characters back for more than mere cameos was the secret ingredient that made this movie great. As a fanboy of these kinds of movies, it was super-fun to see how they brought the characters together, and how they interacted as a kind of team (I too wanted to meet my own multi-verse variants and hang out together — didn’t you?). Plus, big kudos to this movie for smoothing over (or at least making us temporarily forget) the disappointing elements of the first two franchises. Seeing these heroes and villains all appearing in a fun, exciting movie made it feel like all of their original movies were just as good as this one (it’s like how Avengers: Endgame made us forget the disappointments of Iron Man 3 or Thor 2). It felt emotionally satisfying that Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield’s characters both had issues that were kind of resolved by coming out of retirement for a last hurrah. On top of that, their banter was the best, wasn’t it? After having seen this movie, it’s no surprise that Holland is likely bowing out of any sequels. It’s kind of hard to top this. One Spider-Man just doesn’t feel like enough anymore. (5 out of 5)