3 out of 5

Directed by: Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse achieves some truly impressive things: it finds a uniquely modern – and non-grating – way to innovate on animation; it successfully exposes some stylistic choices as relevant to its plot; it made me laugh out loud several times; and perhaps most importantly: it conquers an incredibly mess of character origins and introductions to make a wildly complex concept comprehensible (without it feeling shorted) and the relatively large leading cast all worthwhile and interesting.

…But it doesn’t solve the problem a lot of these hero movies have, of the secret histories and let-me-tell-you-a-storys relegating whatever the bad guy is up to to an afterthought, and the final battle to yawn-worthy spectacle, and some of those praises circle back around to feel less impactful when they’re not maintained throughout the entire flick.

That being said, I have no idea how directors Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman pulled off the more important bits of the story as well as they did, and I almost forgot any doubts I had about the movie with its hilarious after-credits stinger.

Given that it was heavily part of the movie’s promotion, and partially hinted at by its title, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that Into the Spider-Verse is a Spider-Man movie… featuring several Spider-Mans.  The how and why of this happening is, unfortunately, part of the flick’s plotting weakness, but once it kicks us over into the kookiness, the movie’s smarts and charms jam up to eleven and it’s easy to set that aside.  Writers Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman lean into cultural awareness of comic book set-ups – and particularly Spider-Man, seeing as how we’ve had multiple movie incarnations by this point – to wink at us while establishing the origin of Spider-Verse’s lead, Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), another bitten-by-a-spider convert to wall-sticking and spiedy-sensing.  He inadvertently ends up seeking out the Spider-Man we’re used to – Peter Parker (Chris Pine) – moments before he falls foul to the multi-versing machinations of Kingpin Wilson Fisk (Liev Schreiber).  Spider-Man tasks Morales with shutting down Kingpin’s plans, lest the whole world be destroyed…

And so comes our ‘with great powers’ hook, as Miles has to come to grips with how to use his new abilities, whilst surrounded by suddenly appearing other Spider-types: an overweight, depressed Spider-Man (Jake Johnson), a girl Spider-Man (Hailee Steinfeld), an anime Spider-Man (Kimiko Glen), a black-and-white Spider-Man (Nicolas Cage), and a cartoon Spider-Man (John Mulaney), and yes, I’m way under-selling those descriptions.  What makes this a lot more fun and interesting than just a spin on a band of outcasts is how the film’s incredibly stylized take on Morales’ world – the cell-shaded, hip-hop-soundtracked, spraypainted, hyper-edited visuals – gets shifted slightly to favor each character’s point-of-view.  This is also where the movie’s relatively slow start, introducing and fleshing out Miles’ family – mom and dad and uncle – proves worthwhile, as it doesn’t feel like padding when the movie attempts to build actual personalities around these other characters, and without resorting to exposition dumps.  Even Kingpin gets an intelligently shown-not-told justification for his actions.

The middle of the movie is insanely successful and entertaining as a result, with the mish-mash of character types and great voice acting – this was not stunt casting for any role, as everyone nails their persona – leading to some great jokes, and a lot of stunning nuances in the animation lends some really pleasingly effective humanity to several scenes.

But: the story has to go on.  And while Multi-verse may be a champ at giving us such a bonkers set up, it’s ‘stop the multi-verse machine’ motivator never really feels like much of a threat, and the bad guys tossed our way – Prowler, Tombstone, Scorpion – feel like a slapdash fan-service checklist.  The stylistic shifting also fades away, which suggests what the beginning of the film had me thinking: that we’re aiming more for looking and sounding cool over a substantial reason for doing so.  While I’ll accept this is maybe just me getting old and tiring of an endless cycle of soundtrack-selling tunes that fade in only for a chorus we recognize, it nonetheless leads to an overblown, flashy-colored battle sequence of a conclusion that’s the animated counterpart of any given Marvel movie CGI-overdrive.  I appreciate the attempt at trying to enliven things with a different look from the rest of the movie, but my thoughts floated to similar other-worldly sequences in Doctor Strange and the first Ant-Man, and how those worked because of how they remembered to keep the viewer grounded throughout, and Spider-Verse lacks that.  It’s just a lot of people jumping around between floaty platforms, and something taking a long enough time to explode that I kept forgetting it was important.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse exists in that interesting realm of modern animation in which risks are taken, and the humor and writing exists on the threshold of something deeper… but the same connectedness that’s allowed recent kid-fare to produce such interesting and smart variations also is limited by having to rope itself in to cool, hip conventions to appeal to the same.