Spider-Man: No Way Home         3 ½ stars

I know I am late to the party on the Spider-Man movies, but I just saw Spider-Man: No Way Home, directed by Jon Watts and starring Tom Holland as the crime fighting webslinger, a.k.a. Peter Parker. The last Spider-Man movie I saw (not counting the animated ones) was back in 2007 when in Spider-Man 3 Tobey Maquire was Peter Parker and he fought two major villains plus his own suit. That was two iterations ago and things have changed quite a lot since then. For one thing that was before the Spider-Man character was added to the Marvel universe which sort of explains why this Peter Parker doesn’t know about the Avengers. Also, the idea of the multi-verse was added, meaning that this Spider-Man is from a different universe than the earlier versions. This plot device is needed since in the previous Spider-Man movie, Spider-Man: Far From Home, Spider-Man’s secret identity has been revealed by Mysterio before he was killed, something that had not happened before. Is that complicated enough for you? Now Peter is being bombarded by the press and onlookers, threatening him and girlfriend M.J. (Zendaya) and preventing them from getting into MIT as engineering students. (Parker and friends are still high school students and behave like it.) Fortunately for Peter, he is familiar with one of the Avengers, the sorcerer Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) who can cast spells and change the past. So, he asks Strange, “Call me Stephen” to remove the knowledge of Spider-Man’s secret identity from everyone’s memory and make things return to normal. Of course, this plan backfires enabling five villains from other universes to come and challenge Spider-Man to some colossal battles. But things are not all bad because two other Spider-Man’s from other universes come to join our Spider-Man to even things out. The other Spider-man’s are Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield who previously took their turns in the role and none of them are aware of each other before meeting. Apparently, this means that whenever there is a new Spider-Man in the movies, we are actually going to a different universe. This is a very convenient tool for the screenwriters of Marvel movies since this means they never have to worry about maintaining continuity from one movie to the next. It’s just a different universe. And we can credit Doctor Strange with making this possible with his ability to open portals to the multi-verse. (It seems to me that this power would make him by far the most powerful super-hero in the Marvel universe, but maybe I am just over-analyzing.) The movie keeps a high level of comedy throughout, even if most of it is at a juvenile level. The most notable things about Spider-Man: No Way Home are the creative visual effects, especially the contorting of reality done by Doctor Strange when he unleashes his magic spells. The CGI people really work wonders. Otherwise, this is just another Marvel super-hero movie that is mainly about the action fight scenes with the super villains. It’s not one of my favorites.