Say this much for “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”: It’s a lot of movie. When “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” opened in 2018, it felt like a bolt of something genuinely new, its dazzling animation breathing new life into a mini Marvel franchise that was verging on exhaustion and its protagonist, a Brooklyn teenager named Miles Morales (voice of Shameik Moore), taking suave ownership of the iconic title character for a new generation.
As in all things Marvel, a terrific movie cannot be allowed to remain a terrific movie: It must be sequelized, blown up, padded out and lengthened to create way too much of a good thing. In the case of “Across the Spider-Verse,” that means a movie that is an immersive, mesmerizing delight to watch while being something of a chore to sit through.
At 2 hours and 20 minutes, this crammed, crazed, visually stunning bricolage of a film marks yet another entry into the Movies Are Too Damn Long sweepstakes. For Spider-Man aficionados primed to appreciate the rapid-fire barrage of inside jokes and Easter eggs, “Across the Spider-Verse” would be a trippy, fan-friendly pleasure at any running time. Others along for the ride are encouraged to stop trying to follow an alternately chaotic and trite narrative (there’s that pesky multiverse again!) and bathe in images that shimmer, pop, glitch and mutate with mind-bending imagination and speed.
You’re going to ask me what “Across the Spider-Verse” is about, aren’t you? Here goes: A year after the events of “Into the Spider-Verse,” Miles, now 15, is going to high school and missing his friends Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy while suffering the usual pangs of adolescent rebellion and anxiety over soon separating from his warm and understanding parents, Rio (Luna Lauren Velez) and Jeff (Brian Tyree Henry). Oh, and he is busy saving the world as the movie opens from a new supervillain called the Spot, who insists that he is Spidey’s new nemesis.
Advertisement
This setup transpires after another setup: a borderline incoherent prologue during which Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld) does her thing as Spider-Woman, doing battle with a drawing from Renaissance Italy in the Guggenheim. (“Yeah, I think it’s a Banksy,” a nonchalant museum-goer remarks while overlooking the carnage.) Gwen, looking edgy in a pink-tinged undercut and punk-rock scowl, is going through her own struggles with Dad — her father, like Jeff, is a police officer — so is ripe for recruitment when a mysterious group of Spidery superheroes invite her to join their elite strike force. For the next couple of hours and through various portals, alter egos and parallel dimensions, Gwen and Miles travel through multiple universes to try to right wrongs, fend off cosmic collapse and heal personal wounds.
At least, I think that’s what they’re doing? Directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers and Justin K. Thompson from a script by Phil Lord, Christopher Miller and Dave Callahan, “Across the Spider-Verse” is a frenetic, world-hopping carnival ride of a film, its word-happy dialogue and constantly expanding cast of characters leaving garden-variety viewers in the dust of dazed confusion. And, as is now required of every Marvel movie, “Across the Spider-Verse” is nothing if not self-referential: Callbacks and clever, audience-pleasing cameos are rife in a film that makes snarky fun of canon worship even as it practices it at nearly every turn.
For non-Marvelites, it all feels a bit desperate, the self-congratulation going from winkingly playful to unbecoming. Miles and Gwen are still thoroughly appealing as protagonists, as Moore delivers a particularly nuanced performance as a conflicted teenager bristling with equal parts insecurity and anger, and we’re introduced to some equally promising new characters, voiced by Issa Rae, Daniel Kaluuya, Karan Soni and Amandla Stenberg. Their performances, married to reality-adjacent rendering on-screen, make for characterizations that are more fully rounded than in most live-action movies.
Advertisement
Still, for all of “Across the Spider-Verse’s” disorienting action and cut-happy editing, it remains stubbornly inert and, considering the real-life humans behind the animated avatars, strangely uninvolving. The real draw here is, well, the drawing: a visual language that explodes with expressiveness and imagination, taking gloriously full advantage of every palette, mode and mash-up at its disposal.
From lyrical, sunset-toned washes of lavenders, pinks and oranges to pen-and-ink chiaroscuro, vintage Ben-Day dots and Legos to nods toward F.W. Murnau and Jeff Koons, and Ab Ex newsprint collage to computer games, “Across the Spider-Verse” provides a whirligig tour, not just through comic book history but through Art with a capital A: It’s an extravagant, very cool love letter to graphic design, executed with superb draftsmanship and giddy, infectious joy.
It’s just this impressive amalgamation of realism and stylization that allows “Across the Spider-Verse” to transcend its narrative shortcomings: Even at its most obscure or muddled, it’s never less than a pleasure to watch. By the time it reaches its cacophonous, absurdly overdetermined climax, ending in the tantalizing promise of a next installment, it will barely matter if you have no idea what’s happening or why. You’ll want to stay in this world forever.
PG. At area theaters. Contains sequences of animated action violence, some strong language and mature thematic elements. 140 minutes.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLqwwsieqmhqYGeAcHyUaGpqZ6OltqWx0aaYp2WRmL%2Bwv9Jmq6GdXai9qrDEq62eqqOaeq671aKcZqqVq7amw44%3D