--Doctor Strange, Spider-Man: No Way Home
The MCU has its moments and entire films of grand excellence, from the strong acting of Edward Norton as Bruce Banner in The Incredible Hulk to the incredibly relevant political themes of The Winter Soldier to the mirror sacrifices of Gamora and Natasha in Infinity War and Endgame. WandaVision's deeply personal and philosophical exploration of grief, What If...?'s solemn portrayal of Ultron's victories, and Endgame's reunion of Steve and Peggy, even if some of the full entries these are from have obvious, major flaws, are shining examples of cinematic superhero storytelling from Marvel that transcend the fact that the MCU is becoming increasingly reliant on irrelevant, shallow comedy. Spider-Man: No Way Home only has three or four scenes at most that rise anywhere near this level of quality. No Way Home is the Venom: Let There Be Carnage of the core MCU (Let There Be Carnage is now a part of the MCU, after all). Its jokes, or attempts at jokes, are extremely cheesy in ways that even the absolute worst and most forced lines of the MCU have never been before. Its beginning is very rushed and tonally conflicted, speeding through cameos or events as it both leaps into superficial comedy and tries to dramatize the situation Peter Parker finds himself in after being blamed for the killing of Mysterio. Far From Home, which set up the dilemma that drives Peter to seek out Doctor Strange to make the world forget his secret identity, is a vastly superior example of how to make a more focused superhero movie that has better humor, action, and philosophical themes.
Production Values
Before I tackle the many blunders of No Way Home, I want to acknowledge the visual splendor of some of the returning villains and the landscape of places like the mirror dimension. Even a particular action scene where Norman Osborne fights Peter is visually striking due to the way they are falling between floors of a building. There are some great shots that I cannot describe without giving major spoilers. Unfortunately, beyond the performances of some characters, this is where the quality ends. Tom Holland, Zendaya Coleman, Benedict Cumberbatch, Marisa Tomei, Willem Dafoe, and the rest of the cast (I will not betray the names of many other cast members) do a fairly good job with the material and direction they had, but the writing itself at times leads to dialogue worse than that of the 2016 Suicide Squad. Lines like "Scooby-Doo this shit," among other similarly unnecessary or shallow lines, almost relentlessly detract from the dramatic potential of the story. There are genuinely around five scenes or less where the intensity of the premise or the stakes of immediate circumstances have the spotlight on them without the intrusion of any jokes. While, again, I cannot go into many precise details without giving away major plot points, some of the late-movie dialogue is asinine in its cheesiness.
Story
Some spoilers are below--since the spoiler danger for this movie is around Endgame levels despite Endgame, for all of its deficiencies, being far better than No Way Home, I will not share some of the bigger character introductions or plot points.
With Peter Parker's identity as Spider-Man revealed to the public by Mysterio at the end of Far From Home, Peter faces enormous controversy targeted at himself and the friends who learned his identity beforehand. The constant negative impact of his secret becoming familiar to billions eventually sees him consult Doctor Strange to cast a spell to make others forget that he is Spider-Man. Strange casts the spell, but Peter's sheer incompetence at probabilistically assessing outcomes gets in the way as he interrupts Strange enough for the spell to be altered. Instead of making the inhabitants of Earth in the universe the two are in forget Peter is Spider-Man, people from other universes who know that their Peter Parker is Spider-Man are gradually pulled into their universe.
Intellectual Content
Far From Home actually embraced the epistemological uncertainty at the core of general sensory perceptions to great effect, but No Way Home never addresses any substantial issue it raises well except in fragments. Doctor Strange speaks sometimes as if he is a utilitarian, while Aunt May and, at times, Peter himself talk as if it is intrinsically wrong to allow people to die. All of them are just making assumptions; even it it is/was immoral to let the villains die as they were originally going to, it is not as if Aunt May and Peter could know from their conscience, their subjective moral emotions driven by and that drive their preferences. No one in the MCU has ever indicated that they had even a basic grasp of sound moral epistemology, and then No Way Home does not focus strictly on the moral and personal drama of the situation when it needs to anyway thanks to its gluttonous amount of cheap humor. What could have been a film that has a more serious exploration of philosophical truths and possibilities turns out to do almost nothing deep with its moral "dilemma" of allowing the villains to die, its depiction of the multiverse, and even the personal stakes for Spider-Man--at least until near the end with regard to the last part.
Conclusion
No Way Home could have been a masterpiece, a live action Spider-Verse film that directly addressed the MCU's tendency to make the names and faces of its heroes publicly available with realistic weight, teased the gravity of the coming events of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and honored two prior iterations of the title character. Of those possible accomplishments, the one it comes closest to is showing just how dangerous multiversal portals can be, but so much of the movie is wasted on cramming in jokes at almost every opportunity that the seriousness of the situation is usually overlooked. Quite literally, only a handful of scenes have any of the emotional stakes or philosophical significance that No Way Home needed to consistently have in order to not fall far short of its potential. Especially in light of the atrocious mishandling of Venom: Let There Be Carnage, if this foreshadows the quality of the dialogue that future MCU films will have, then the most successful movie franchise in history will no longer deserve its cultural primacy going forward.
Content:
1. Violence: Blood is spilled in several scenes, one of them having a great deal more seriousness than the others. For the majority of the movie, bloodlessly punching and throwing opponents is as brutal as the characters act.
2. Profanity: "Shit" is used on multiple occasions.
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