Spiderman: Across the Spider-verse

Or: Tangled Webs

When we last left Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) he had come into his own as his own Spiderman, saved the world, and bid his friends ado. Now days, he’s hit the swing of things, but balancing his heroics, his secret identity, his relationship with his parents Jefferson (Brian Tyree Henry) and Rio (Luna Loren Velez), his college application, and the loneliness from being away from his cross universe mentor Peter (Jake Johnson) and …friend (?) Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld) is beginning to wear.

That is until Gwen shows up in his universe. Her own life is also off kilter, bereft, and guilt ridden until she joins a secret, world hopping community of spider folk, lead by Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaacs), a group with an interest in Miles that is not necessarily benign.

Following the majesty (and I do not use the word lightly) of Into the Spider-Verse the second in Miles’s trilogy does not disappoint. The shifts in art from Miles’s crosshatched world to Gwen’s watercolor one, to the too perfect gloss of Miguel’s flow seamlessly (there are some vistas, from the Williamsburg Savings Bank Tower, where it’s a toss up as to whether the vista or the emotional intimacy conjured between Steinfeld and Moore will make you cry first), while the action is just as breathtaking as ever in blend of drama, precision and cleverness. The story too is seamless, the script thwipping with hysterical-cackle grade jokes (verbal, visual, or meta-versal) and plot twists that perfect mix of never-see-it-coming and it-was-right-there-all-along, planted on the threshold of revelation.

This is very much Gwen’s movie and Steinfeld gives her usual excellence: a bright and gleaming confidence that is slicked-over suffering that fractures into prisms at precise moments.

Special notes goes to Pavitr Prabhakar (Karan Soni) Spiderman of Mubbhatan and superb quipper, and Hobie Brown (Daniel Kaluuya) a Punk Spiderman from a collage universe, who singlehandedly makes Anarchism cool again. The film also spends a good deal of time cementing the bonds between the Morales family, with Henry and Velez bouncing off each other and Moore in an intimate portrait.

And of course, the hidden gem of Jason Schwartzman as the Spot, a comedically monstrous “villain of the week” (look how many hole puns he can make), who claims Miles’s Spiderman as his archnemesis. Schwartzman’s journey from nebbish criminal, undone by a bagel (what is it about the multiverse and bagels?) to a terrifying supervillain, is done without melodramatic jigs. The coldness that was in the heart of the performance all along, creeps to the outside and leaves a thrilling chill indeed.