Spider-Man: No Way Home is like the proverbial blind squirrel that finds a nut every now and then, except that it doesn’t so much find them as it steals them from another squirrel’s hoard. The massive combined gravitas generated by Willem Dafoe, Alfred Molina, and Jamie Foxx would be enough to save any other movie; the problem is that this film is not theirs to save, and it’s barely a film at all to begin with – it’s more like the superhero equivalent of that Pink Panther movie they made with spare parts from previous Pink Panther movies.
If I want Willem Dafoe as the Green Goblin, why not just revisit 2002’s Spider-Man? Similarly, if I have a hankering for Alfred Molina as Doc Ock, why not just rewatch 2004’s Spider-Man 2? The latter was, according to Roger Ebert, “the best superhero movie since the modern genre was launched with "Superman"”. How the mighty have fallen. It’s great to see Dafoe and Molina sharing screen time, but once the novelty – or rather the nostalgia – wears off, we are left with only a reminder of how comparatively superior Sam Raimi’s trilogy was, as well as a testament of how downhill things have gone since then.
When Molina finally arrives, following an excruciatingly dumb, seemingly endless first half hour, he does so like a godsend; unfortunately, as much as we welcome the company of someone with a gleam of intelligence in his eyes, Doc Ock’s edge has been dulled by poor stylistic choices – first, his mechanical tentacles are 100% computer-generated (as opposed to Spider-Man 2, which used CGI to enhance, but not fully replace, a set of prop tentacles), and second, Molina was digitally de-aged (as was Dafoe), though in this case, unlike for example The Irishman, the unintended uncanny valley effect might have been a blessing in disguise; after all, Doc Ock is supposed to be a comic book villain, so that grotesqueness actually becomes him.
All things considered, everything and everyone endemic to the MCU Spider-Man is as flat and artificial as cardboard (our sympathy inevitably lies with the villains because, goblins and octopuses though they may be, they remain at all times more human – and certainly have a cleverer sense of humor – than any of the heroes with the exception of Tobey Maguire, and while Spider-Man may prevail over Norman Osborne, Dafoe totally obliterates Holland in terms of acting); at the same time, all the best parts are almost exclusively lifted from the work – and not even the best work at that – of a much more talented filmmaker. To put it bluntly, Spider-Man: No Way Home has absolutely no reason for being.