Spider-Man: Nobody’s Home is like a high school reunion. There’s a lot of old faces, some you recognize, some you don’t, and a few you feel like you probably once did but forgot a while ago. It’s an excuse for a valedictory lap for the winners. They can parade around the room, deigning to gift the rest of us with a handshake or a fake smile and hogging the shrimp cocktails, while us losers showed up just to see if any of the victors are hiring pool cleaners or if the girl we pined for way back when has fallen so far that she is finally attainable.
Spider-Man: Nobody’s Home is not like a high school reunion in that I did not experience extreme anxiety about a quarter of the way through and did not spend the rest of the evening locked in a bathroom stall with a bottle of peppermint schnapps and my vomit mixing with the redolent odor of stale urine and shit. I just assumed that at least one person from my class would have turned out worse than me, and that I could spend the night hanging out with them to make myself feel better. I was wrong and telling people you’re a fake movie critic that swears a lot on the Internet doesn’t impress old acquaintances as much as you might think.
The movie is nostalgia, Marvel style. That is, big budget, lots of action, but still rooted deeply in the cynical, hermetically sealed, continuous-revenue-stream “universe” the grassfuckers have crafted to take your money today, tomorrow and forever. It’s a clever way to tell us it’s perfectly okay that they keep remaking Spider-Man movies because they aren’t “reboots” or “remakes” or “mistakes” (i.e., The Interminable Spider-Man 2: Electro Boogaloo). No, the variations just take place in different parallel universes while we are stuck in the one where movie tickets are sold. There is one for Tobey Maguire is Spider-Man one, the one with Andrew Garfield, and now the Tom Holland one.
So, not only is there a current Marvel universe full of about 18,000 people in tights who make shitty quips, there are also as many different universes as there have been previous movies featuring different people in tights. And the grassfuckers in Hollywood want us to keep all this straight. I have a hard enough time distinguishing raccoons from cats when coming home full of cheap beer from the Twins Inn, so Marvel demands hell of a lot from me. And when people demand a hell of a lot from me, I am more determined than ever to fail. I shut the fuck down faster than a Chinese air conditioner from wish.com in July.
Spider-Man: Nobody’s Home starts in the Tom Holland universe where his Spider-Man/Peter Parker suffers from celebrity and the haters that come with it. By the way, it’s entirely possible to have haters without success. Ask me how. A sensationalistic media has convinced the public that a dude in tights fighting crime all alone may not be such a great thing. And that has jeopardized the chances to get into M.I.T. for Spider-Man, his girlfriend M.J. (Zendaya Maree Stoermer Coleman) and best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon).
Spider-Man visits Siegfried and Roy enthusiast Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch Wellington Salisbury Bedminster), a magician who comes off very much like a chiropractor who demands to be called doctor when putting his name on the wait list at TGI Fridays, buys tight t-shirts with glitter on them, and double parks his BMW. Spider-Man asks Dr. Strange to cast a spell so that people will forget who he is, thereby making it possible for his friends to not be associated with him. Mid-spell, though, Spider-Man tries to change his request, and fouls the spell like a fart at a funeral. The screw-up opens portals to other universes wherein old Spider-Man movie villains (and Spidermen) live. Not all of them, though, just some. Like Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin from the Tobey Maguire universe make the grade, but not Dan DeHaan’s from the Andrew Garfield one. Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock gets in, but not Paul Giamatti’s Rhino. James deFranco is still stuck in the old universe where the teen girls never age.
In total, there are like five or six bad guys, including a dude made of sand, Jamie Foxx’s still lame-as-a-diabetic’s-dick Electro and another fellow who is a British lizard. Most of them appear to have doctorate degrees of some sort, which makes me wonder about our educational system. Why doesn’t it weed out the psychopaths? Also, when the villains are all together at once, the simplistic bad guy formula is laid bare. All were once promising geniuses who got bonked on the head, or an equivalent. That shit is dumb. Men in tights movies need to stop deploying the same lazy trope to make bad guys sympathetic. These are comic book movies. Bad guys can just be bad, as long as they’re interesting. The return on investment for bad guy backstories is really, really low.
Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire’s Spidermen come out of retirement through multiverse portals to help the current Spider-Man do battle. Dr. Strange gets all pissy. The current batch of friends get interfere. Buildings collapse, cars get destroyed, the Spidermen are put on the ropes, and somehow prevail. Once you get past the three Spider-Man at once thing the battles and scenery are standard stuff.
The movie is shit-ass long, like two-and-a-half hours which feels more like 14 years when you’re in a theater surrounded by unmasked people who won’t shut up and sneeze a lot. It could’ve been shorter simply by taking out all of Jon Favreau playing a fat nudnik dating Spider-Man’s aunt (a still hot Marisa Tomei), and by spending less time letting the Spidermen be nostalgic with each other. I mean, Marvel expects viewers to recognize all these villains, but then wants to remind us how each of the heroes is different, and who their girlfriends are. Like a fucking high school reunion with a bunch of people you don’t care about. The only reason I was there was to see if Kirsten Dunst’s Mary Jane from the Tobey Maguire universe came. She didn’t. Now I don’t know if she’s too good for the rest of us, or if she’s fallen so low she couldn’t stop drinking cough syrup. For my sake, I hope the latter.
Frequent viewers are rewarded if they recognize all these callbacks from twenty years’ worth of movies. I have been, at best, as faithful in watching these movies as I have been in changing my underwear. Like, I said at the beginning, some I knew, some I kind of did, others nope. Only Dafoe’s Green Goblin really registers as interesting. Doc Ock is quickly dispatched, and the others mostly just sulk until they are needed to fight.
I give Marvel credit for coming up with a clever excuse for their constant regurgitation of limited material. And I give them credit for at least not taking this movie too seriously. Deep down, though, it’s still Marvel, it’s still their rules, made up as they go along with the expectation we’ll follow. I mean, a wizard that can cast whatever spell the movie needs? Come on. Plus, Spider-Man 2: Nobody’s Home is just a piece of a much bigger product being sold. You’re a sucker to buy in because the only reward for you is knowing more when buying more tickets. Two Fingers.
By the way, don’t stick around for any end credit scenes. There are two. The first is mid-credits and for people so far up the Marvel butthole they know every polyp. I made neither heads nor tails of it. The second is just a shitty trailer for a Dr. Strange movie, the one where someone scratches his gray 328i and he goes apeshit.
By the way, does anyone need a pool cleaner? Or if Kirsten Dunst has a pool?