Spider man into the spider verse review

What separates the Phil Lord/Chris Miller braintrust from the rest of Hollywood is that they’re willing to admit that franchise movie-making is often silly, motivated primarily by money, and fundamentally embarrassing. Instead of looking at the tacky demands of the industry – intellectual property-jockeying, sequels mandated by executives with adding machines in the lobe of the brain normally dedicated to creativity – as obstructions to be overcome, they make them part of the joke.

Their 21 Jump Street revival made fun of its own irrelevancy to the pop culture landscape of the 2010s, and the follow-up used its underlying nature as a clear cash-grab as the starting point for comedy. Where the Marvel Universe has become hopelessly overstuffed with characters and plot lines, Lord and Miller’s Lego movies embraced that same overstuffed-ness to emulate the chaotic, anything-goes mash-ups of a child’s playtime. They’re postmodern pop-art Rumpelstiltskins, spinning corporate directives into original, self-referential, self-effacing art.

Lord and Miller produced the cracking new animated feature Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and Lord penned the script with Rodney Rothman, who co-directed with Bob Persichetti and Peter Ramsey. That’s a lot of cooks in the kitchen, but the result has the unmistakable Lord/Miller touch in its conversion of studio impositions into amusement-park thrills. The script brings the Spider-Man character’s convoluted pile-up of continuities (Tobey Maguire begat Andrew Garfield begat Tom Holland begat assorted spin-offs) to the forefront, essentially building an entire premise around a punchline from The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. The confusion that comes from keeping track of Peter Parker’s repeatedly reset relationship with Mary Jane, the annoyance of having to watch the same origin story over and over; it’s all part of the bit in a wildly imaginative adventure that uses dimensional physics to lighten the baggage currently weighing down the rest of the superhero genre.

In a New York vividly rendered with expressionistic animation that evokes the look and feel of comics right down to the Ben-Day dots, we meet not Parker, but Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore). We know the drill, and the movie knows that we know the drill: teenager, high school, magic spider, bite, powers. Elsewhere, the rectangle-shaped Kingpin (voice of Liev Schreiber) and his sinister lead scientist (voice of Kathryn Hahn) dabble with volatile technology that tears open a rift in the multi-verse through which timelines start to interweave.

A paunchy, washed-up Peter Parker (voice of Jake Johnson) first crosses Morales’ path, then a too-cool-for-school Spider-Gwen (voice of Hailee Steinfeld). For impeccably cast comic support, they’re then joined by the hard-boiled Spider-Man Noir (voice of Nicolas Cage, in irrefutable proof that God exists and wants us to be happy), Looney Tunes castoff Spider-Ham (voice of John Mulaney), and anime arachno-droid SP//dr along with its operator Peni Parker (voice of Kimiko Glenn). Only by uniting their powers can they stand a chance against Kingpin and a handful of smartly selected, well-deployed, second-string villains from Spidey’s rogues’ gallery.

Though they occupy the same frame, each of the Spider-friends moves with their own distinct animation style informed by their home dimension, and that’s just one in a smorgasbord of clever visual flourishes. Not since Sam Raimi’s godly mid-2000s run has the kinetic exhilaration of web-swinging felt so tactile, and the Manhattan through which our hero sails felt so specifically realized. While the computerized cinematography roots our assorted Spider-Men in a coherent physical space, the production design gleefully sprints as far as it can in the opposite direction. The animators indulge in fits of vibrant psychedelia worthy of comparison to the Wachowski sisters’ candy-colored Speed Racer, culminating in a retina-searing grand finale that crams a tempest in a lava lamp. At long last, a Spider-Man cartoon that goes well with MDMA!

With the exception of the hangdog Peter Parker’s prepackaged redemption arc, every piece of this finely calibrated machine is properly functioning and operating at maximum capacity. It’s the kind of seemingly effortless success that makes producing a good superhero movie look easy: find a likable hero and a colorful villain, hire someone who knows how to write a punch line, and for Stan Lee’s sake, keep it fun. But Lord and Miller have gotten as far as they have because they know that it’s not quite that simple. Before they can build a new chapter of a pop-culture legacy case, they must first deconstruct everything that’s come before. Their staunch refusal to take the blockbuster seriously got them kicked off Han Solo, but in this instance, it’s fully revitalized a series on course for creative collapse. May the Marvel overlords give Lord and Miller the keys to the rest of the MCU. They’re the only ones who can see that to save it, they must destroy it.

• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is released on 14 December

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