By the end of the week, Spider-Man: No Way Home will make its debut in movies theaters throughout the US. It is a highly-anticipated film, and Marvel Studios believe they have a winter hit on their hands. Even though many moviegoers are opting to view new films through streaming services as the country is still battling the COVID-19 pandemic, the new Spider-Man movie will debut exclusively in movie theaters and not on Disney Plus.
Some critics from popular media outlets have already seen and critiqued the film. Newsweek has done an excellent job in collecting the early data.
New York Post
Writer Johnny Oleksinski believes Spider-Man: No Way Home will shock fans — but not for the reason you think. The movie appears to be transformative for Tom Holland as Peter Parker as he goes a “Spider-Boy” to a “Spider-Man.”
Oleksinski is full of praise for Holland’s performance as “the former Billy Elliot proves he’s more than a teen idol with a perfect American accent.” He goes on to describe Holland’s performance as full of “gravitas, emotional oomph, brutality, believable love,” and “an anguished scene in the rain! The movie is the actor’s best performance yet.” Oleksinski and the New York Post award the movie three and a half out of four stars.
CNN
Brian Lowry should set worried Marvel fans at ease as he believes the movie “impressively lives up to the hype.”
Secrecy has surrounded Spider-Man: No Way Home and Lowry believes there will be “whoops and hollers from appreciative fans in theaters, when Spider-Man first reveals its secrets.”
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone’s review was a little less spectacular but still positive. David Fear calls Spider-Man: No Way Home a “perfectly fine superhero movie.” Make of that what you will.
He appears to have an issue with the story mechanics and how it reflects on previous Spider-Man movies. Apparently the new Disney-backed Spider-Man movie manages to “somehow retcons an entire comic-book multiverse under one mouse-eared roof.”
IGN
One of the fresher takes on Spider-Man: No Way Home, IGN‘s Amelia Emberwing believes the film is a Saturday morning cartoon mixed with a deep MCU drama, but she loves it.
“There’s truly never a dull moment” in the movie which is hard to properly discuss because of the amount of secrets and potential spoilers available. The largely positive review does acknowledge that is does struggle with some tired superhero tropes but everything else will leave fans grinning from ear-to-ear.
The Guardian
By discussing the fact that the third Spider-Man movies in a franchise seem to be cursed, Benjamin Lee from The Guardian believes “for the most part” that Spider-Man: No Way Home is a success.
Lee is sad to see the small-scale teen movie vibes of the first two movies disappear in this third film which gets massive in scale. He also believes the script lacks the “expected fizz” we’ve come to expect from McKenna and Sommers.
Vanity Fair
Richard Lawson tells Vanity Fair readers that Spider-Man: No Way Home is a “very tangled web” which relies on these times of “comic-book oversaturation, using Hollywood’s troubling repetitiveness to curious, if slight, advantage.”
A middling to positive reception from Lawson, he believes the movie is “mostly just a triumph of studio executives agreeing on things” when considering the way that Marvel and Sony have come together to combine franchises.
The Hollywood Reporter
Falling under the weight of its predecessors, John DeFore believes Spider-Man: No Way Home is the least fun of the Tom Holland movies, but still a hell of a lot better than the last Spider-Man threequel from Tobey Maguire.
With multiple Spider-Man villains incoming, DeFore believes the fan service plays well but is “unsubtle enough” that you expect the actors to give a wink to the camera as they’re delivering lines.
USA Today
Brian Truitt is full of praise for the third Holland Spider-Man movie, pronouncing that it’s no longer just Avengers movies that get to be “dimension-hopping, mega-action epics with tons of surprise characters.”
Hinting at the plot details, Spider-Man: No Way Home could be a perfectly timed release on 16 December as there is a It’s a Wonderful Life, Christmas-themed resolution to the story too.