148 min | PG-13 | December 17, 2021 | Columbia Pictures
Peter Parker’s identity is public, his life is wrecked, and he asks Doctor Strange for a spell to make everyone forget. The spell goes wrong and tears open the multiverse. The villains pour through, and the movie spends two hours cashing in old memories.
Peter Parker stands exposed. The world knows Spider-Man’s name, and the people he loves pay the price. He turns to Doctor Strange for a spell that erases his identity from everyone’s memory. The spell fractures and pulls villains from other realities into his. What starts as a story about a teenager losing his future becomes a machine for delivering nostalgia, and the film knows exactly which buttons it is pressing.
Tom Holland plays Peter with real grief under the wisecracks. He carries the cost of every choice in his face, and the film asks him to anchor a plot that keeps threatening to swallow him. Zendaya plays MJ with a guarded warmth that makes the stakes personal rather than cosmic. Willem Dafoe returns as Norman Osborn and walks away with the movie. His Green Goblin is gleeful and predatory, and he snaps between the broken man and the monster without a seam. Jamie Foxx plays Electro with a looseness that the script underuses.
Jon Watts directs with efficient momentum and a clear sense of when to slow down for a reaction shot. The screenplay by Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers builds its second half almost entirely around recognition. The action sets stage the brawls in mirror dimensions and on construction scaffolding where the geometry keeps shifting under the characters. The visual effects integrate the spectacle cleanly, and the camera holds on the villains long enough to let their faces sell the reunions. The structure leans on the audience already knowing these characters, and that dependence is both the engine and the ceiling.
This is a film engineered to reward memory. It works on those terms because the cast commits and Dafoe gives it a genuine threat to play against. The emotional core lands when Holland is allowed to be a kid losing everything rather than a node in a franchise. The film never fully escapes its own assignment, which is to assemble a crowd-pleasing reunion and let the feeling of recognition stand in for invention. It satisfies the want it creates and rarely reaches past it.