Despite hints of the interpersonal nuance Cretton brought to his indie work (best seen in 2013’s Short Term 12) lurking in a bulky script, recognizable elements of Asian action cinema struggling for breath under countless layers of digital sediment and one of our greatest living actors working wonders as its villain, Shang-Chi is as bland and busy as its title. Stars: Simu Liu, Awkwafina, Meng’er Zhang, Fala Chen, Florian Munteanu, Benedict Wong, Michelle Yeoh, Tony Leung, Ben Kingsleyĭelayed by and filmed throughout the pandemic, filmmaker Destin Daniel Cretton’s sprawling and intangible martial arts journey wears its rich influences openly, treats its supporting cast reverently and dilutes it all predictably. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings Perhaps the fact that Spider-Man: No Way Home finds any success in this familiar territory, after devoting itself so wholly to unwieldly examinations of its own IP, is itself its biggest surprise. It’s valuable, this recollection, but getting back to Spider-Man basics is a shallow victory with diminished returns. All the spectacle, all the stunt performers and stunt casting-it all evaporates like so many Snapped extras when confronted with small, connected scenes of human-level dramatic filmmaking that remind you why broke loser Peter Parker resonates with us so deeply in the first place. After so long playing with the legacy and impact of Spider-Man, No Way Home finds its way back. It’s not that it’s without the MCU’s required final act CG spectacular, but that said spectacular is followed by an excellent denouement, subtly written and acted in turn by performers who’ve waited years to actually act with each other. Spider-Man: No Way Home’s routine is overwhelmed with flourishes, more devoted to Spider-Man™ than its Spider-Man.
If you don’t really care about a fan-fictional Spidey Greatest Hits parade, there’s some other stuff in the movie (it continues trying to convince us that Marisa Tomei’s May and Jon Favreau’s Happy were anything but a long and bad running joke it lightly engages with bad journalism’s shift from tabloids to InfoWars) but you can tell it’s mostly ceremonial. If so, congratulations: They’re here and shenanigans ensue. What follows, with characters from past Spidey films getting interdimensionally sucked to this NYC, only really makes sense if you’ve been keeping a keen eye on casting rumors. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and plead for a magical worldwide memory wipe without really considering consequences or alternatives.
So it fits that when he, his girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) and BFF Ned (Jacob Batalon) face problems-blown out of proportion by crippling cases of teen-brain-he’d run off to Dr. A nervous, charming goodie-goodie with a headful of knowledge and not a lick of sense. What director Jon Watts’ trilogy has done better than its Raimi and Webb counterparts is convince us that Peter Parker is a kid. No Way Home is an intriguing case study of corporate collaboration, a self-aware meme machine, and a lackluster movie that understands its hero so well that the disservice stings all the greater. It is a metatextual collage, which often overshadows the actual text-it’s easy to miss the movie for the Easter eggs. It is a massive fan servicing crossover, with the MCU bringing staggeringly little to the fold like a potluck mooch. The multiverse, which supplemented the Oscar-winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse origin story with explosive animated verve, is the only force at work here. That’s what the film is hoping for, as its premise-that Peter Parker (Tom Holland) has come so far from his enjoyably low-key Homecoming, his secret identity known thanks to Far From Home, that he must literally toy with fate spanning far beyond his own universe-assumes its audience has a working knowledge and appreciation of two decades of Spider-Man cinema. It delivers what’s expected and whether you cry “spoilers” or not, you likely already know exactly what I mean. Spider-Man: No Way Home holds no surprises. Stars: Tom Holland, Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, Zendaya, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jacob Batalon, Jon Favreau, Marisa Tomei If you want the best movies of 2021, go here, but if you want to know what the biggest films of the year were-at least in America-here are the 20 highest-grossing movies of 2021. The global picture was completely different with two Chinese films that weren’t even released here ( The Battle at Lake Changjin and Hi, Mom) beating out everything but the latest Spider-Man.
Kudos to Free Guy for at least coming up with something new. were either sequels or part of a larger franchise. With Marvel movies taking up a quarter of the entire domestic box office this year, superheroes once again were good for business.