58/100

One dimension too many. No, not the alternate dimension that disgorged Spider-Ham (though Mulaney only gets one really good line, making the character feel like a wasted opportunity). I'm talking about width, about contemporary animation's misguided insistence on replicating the contours of the real world. People are raving about Spider-Verse as a dazzling visual experience, and I half-concur—whenever the film gets aggressively 2-D, adding delirious motion to the multi-layered flatness of comic-book panels, it's something to behold. But its baseline is standard-issue computer-generated sculpting, which basically amounts to photo-realism that signifies cartoonishness via exaggerated rounding, as if everything onscreen were made of rubber. I've grown quite weary of this particular look, and was crushed to find it dominating the first act here; add to that the script's rather laborious setup, with its focus on Miles' dad and surrogate dad, and the movie had kinda lost me by the time it finally explodes into delirium. And even then, the mundane keeps re-asserting itself, both formally and narratively. A friend who adores The Lego Movie, and was flummoxed by my finding that film a bit too hyperactive, warned me that I might have a similar response to this one; if anything, the opposite is true—too much of it is too normal, too conventional, insufficiently deranged. It's a lot of e.g. Spider-Man Noir not understanding a Rubik's Cube, and jokes about Peter B. Parker's paunch, and Peni snacking at the controls of her robot or whatever it is. Cute, but forgettable. And then of course there's the earnest life lesson, which one can still rarely escape when it comes to mainstream entertainment. (That's the main reason why Game Night isn't my favorite film of the year.) As is often the case, I'm emphasizing what didn't delight me at the expense of what did, but only because there's nearly universal consensus on the latter. Had I gone into this with low expectations, I'd be expressing pleasant surprise, marveling at the unusually offbeat premise and the creative use of comic-book text and the intermittent hand-drawn dynamism. Instead, people are treating it like the Second Coming, and I'm forced to don my supervillain costume yet again. Kneel before the Contrarian!