Quick Synopsis: A forgotten Peter Parker lives completely isolated four years after No Way Home. While working as a full-time, anonymous hero, he faces a bizarre crime wave tied to a psionic threat while dealing with a dangerous physical mutation and reconnecting with a memory-wiped MJ

Online discourse states that superheroes are used as the ideal male fantasy. A strong man who single-handedly defeats evil, gets the girl, and is admired by society, and sometimes he’s rich. In a way, that’s pretty accurate. The male gaze is generally used to discuss how female characters are viewed, but it definitely applies to male ones too. They’re people we’re supposed to envy, people we’re supposed to want to be. So with that in mind, it’s somewhat sweet how one of the most highly regarded superheroes on the big screen began as a teenager full of sarcasm and anxiety. Not including television films, there have been 11 Spider-Man films, and only three of them have really fallen out of favour with audiences or critics. On the other hand, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is in a slump, with recent films not reaching the commercial, critical, or pop culture-penetrating heights of some of the previous. It’s into this pit of uncertainty that SM: BND (Pronounced Sum Bond) steps. The highs of the character and the lows of the MCU mean that expectations are uneven: you can go into this expecting either the next great Spider-Man film or another symptom of Marvel’s current decline

In the end, it’s pretty damn good. Firstly, it feels less gimmick-dependent than the previous three movies. There’s no expectation of a twist or unexpected-but-actually-expected-by-everyone characters. So it’s standing on its own legs for the first time in a while. Much like Peter himself, the franchise has matured into something worthy. Holland and Zendaya have incredible chemistry; even an idiot could guess they’re dating in real life. This is the best work the two have pulled off in this franchise; both giving their characters inner depth and turmoil.

I’ve always rated Tom Holland as Spider-Man; he’s always been the right performer for this iteration, playing him with just the right balance between anger and lightheartedness. BND adds a new level of weariness to his performance. You have the suspicion that his version of Peter Parker does not want to be Spider-Man anymore; he doesn’t get any sense of pride or joy from it. It’s not even a societal need; he does it because he feels he has nothing else to his life now that he no longer has MJ. He feels he has no life outside of Spider-Man. BND doesn’t give us much sense of what he does when he isn’t Spider-Man. We don’t really see a job, a social circle, or much of a life at all. Spider-Man is all he has right now. There’s a real sense of hopelessness to the character that is refreshing to see. Yes, he still makes jokes (this is an MCU film after all; if Stalin was a character in this universe, he’d be making quips as he kills people), but they mask a sense of sadness.

On the downside, the villain is underwhelming. BND does the same thing that a lot of superhero films have done lately; the person you thought was the villain turns out to not be a villain, and they end up teaming up with the hero to defeat a bigger, supposedly more important villain (who was usually someone we thought was a hero). Narratively, that’s risky, because it could mean the actual villain ends up feeling superfluous and defeated too quickly. That’s the case here. I can’t even remember their name; I can’t even remember what happened to them at the end. Were they killed? Arrested? Not a clue. Their impact on this movie is the same as a wasp flying into a cruise ship.

That’s a shame, as there’s a lot of villains they could have worked into this. I’m surprised they haven’t turned Ned into a villain. The mind-wipe would have been the perfect opportunity. It’s established he’s good at science; it would have been easy enough to give him a grudge against Spider-Man. The moment where Peter realises that he has to fight Ned could have been one of the most powerful moments in the franchise, and could have allowed Jacob Batalon to show a bit more range than he’s been allowed to show. It would mean the villain isn’t just someone for Spider-Man to fight; he’s someone Peter has a deeply personal history with. It would also give Peter something he desperately lacks in this film: someone who knows him. Peter has lost MJ, Aunt May is gone, his identity has been erased, and his former best friend doesn’t know him. Making Ned the villain would turn that loneliness into the actual dramatic conflict. Plus, it would write your closing shot for you: Ned and Peter are friends again, Ned unaware that Peter is Spider-Man, they’re joking and having fun, then there’s a look of slight distrust from both of them to the other; MJ sits unaware of the potential problem brewing in front of her.

A smaller issue is the time jump. There’s a montage of Spidey defeating low-level foes, but there’s not enough variety in it to make it feel like years have passed. We see him stopping a few crimes, beating up a few interchangeable villains, and generally doing the same thing Spider-Man has always done, but there’s no real sense of time passing. If you removed that montage and one or two lines of dialogue, you could pitch this film as happening a few months after the events of the previous one and very little would need to change. That’s particularly strange because the film has apparently decided that several years have passed, which should mean Peter has fundamentally changed. Instead, everyone feels more or less frozen in place. Peter has become more miserable, but that’s a development the film could have established without telling us several years have passed. MJ hasn’t meaningfully changed, and the world around them doesn’t feel substantially different. A time jump can be a really useful storytelling device because it allows you to skip the less interesting parts of a character’s life and show us the consequences of that time passing, but here it feels more like the filmmakers wanted the novelty of saying “years later” without actually doing anything with those years. It’s not a huge problem, but it does make the film’s timeline feel strangely artificial.

BND exists in a slightly strange position. As a Spider-Man film, it doesn’t really need to care about the wider MCU. As an MCU film, however, it’s impossible to completely ignore what comes next, especially when what comes next is supposed to be one of the biggest films in the franchise. The problem is that Marvel has spent years training audiences to look for the bigger picture. We’re supposed to notice the references, remember the post-credit scenes and speculate about what everything is building towards. When that build-up suddenly disappears, it becomes noticeable. Especially when they’re still doing the post-credit scenes, only they’re not building towards anything. Vulture still hasn’t reappeared, the beacon sent out by the Ten Rings hasn’t been answered, and Charlize Theron’s cameo in the last Doctor Strange film still appears to have led absolutely nowhere. Side note: that list was originally MUCH longer, but my editor said it was too tiring to read, which kind of proves my point about the MCU’s lack of follow-up.

Obviously, Doomsday could be incredible as a film and as a villain. Maybe the lack of set-up is the point. To be honest, after the Kang issue, I can see why they’d be reluctant to throw everything into one basket. Marvel’s response to that has been weird. It hasn’t really been to course-correct; it’s been to quietly remove the things that were supposed to lead somewhere. But there’s a difference between not revealing your villain and not establishing the world in which your villain exists. Thanos wasn’t properly explained until Infinity War, but we’d already been given reasons to know he was important. The Infinity Stones had been introduced, the Avengers had encountered his influence, and the universe had gradually been moving towards him. If Doomsday is going to be the new centre of the MCU, Marvel has some catching up to do.

Still, that’s a problem for the next film, not necessarily this one. And I think it’s important to separate the two. I’ve spent a lot of this review talking about the state of Marvel, but that’s because BND is arriving at a particularly awkward point in the franchise’s history. It would be unfair to judge it entirely on whether Marvel has a coherent five-year plan, especially when the film itself is actually quite good. When BND is focused on Peter, it works. When it’s asking me to think about where the MCU is going next, it reminds me of everything that’s gone wrong with the franchise.

And ultimately, that’s why Spider-Man has endured. He isn’t the ideal male fantasy I talked about at the beginning. He’s not a rich, confident man who gets everything he wants and is universally admired. He’s a lonely, sarcastic idiot who has been given incredible powers and somehow ended up with even more problems. He loses people, makes mistakes, gets beaten up, and still gets up the next morning and puts the suit back on. There’s something much more appealing about that than watching another superhero who seems to have everything figured out.

That’s what BND gets right. It doesn’t need to make Peter the most powerful person in the MCU, or give him another universe-ending threat to defeat. It just needs to make me care about the miserable bastard underneath the mask. And for the most part, it does. It’s not the best Spider-Man film we’ve had, and it certainly isn’t going to rescue the MCU single-handedly. But it doesn’t need to. Spider-Man has survived three different actors, multiple reboots, a cinematic universe, several attempts at making everything connected, and at least one film where the villain was a man made entirely of sand. He’ll probably survive Marvel’s current existential crisis too.

That being said, I’d still rather have another Spider-Verse movie.