In the Flesh: Across the Spider-Verse

I don’t understand casting Oscar Isaac in a role where nobody gets to see Oscar Isaac. The man has good screen presence, he’s incredibly beautiful, but he’s hardly Clancy Brown when it comes to voice acting, you know? He’s pretty flat as edgy, vampiric Spider-Man Miguel, leader of a cross-dimensional team of Spiders-Man tasked with protecting the “canon” of their interlinking stories. Set him next to Shameik Moore, who voices Miles Morales, or Hailee Steinfeld as Gwen Stacy/Ghost Spider and it becomes faintly embarrassing. Shea Whigham has a bit part as Gwen’s cop dad and with maybe twenty lines he creates a memorable, moving character. Karan Soni absolutely murders the role of Pavitr Prabhakar, the Spider-Man of a science fictional Manhattan/Mumbai mashup. Isaac just doesn’t have the juice, and it hamstrings the dynamic the film tries to build between him and Miles.

The film’s action is often delightful, fast-paced and balletic, easy to follow. Its multiple animation departments manage a great many different styles with aplomb. The script, co-written by Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, and Dave Callaham is fairly bright and breezy until it slams headlong into the second act’s wall of exposition. Canon events, a multiverse in peril, a Spider-Man bitten by the wrong universe’s spider and now doomed to bust up the character’s long tradition of suffering. It’s not an inherently bad idea to literalize your movie’s place in a stodgy industry history of hashing and rehashing the same story, but to make it feel like anything more than a gimmick you have to do more than just layer that story over itself a few hundred times. Across the Spider-Verse is snappy and fun when it’s working through its Spider-Man story beats, but its insistence on making a production of the mythology of Spider-Man as an icon turns stodgy and tepid and pushes things into a tedious string of chase scenes and shoehorned revelations.

Across the Spider-Verse is certainly one of the best recent superhero movies, in spite of its considerable flaws, but that isn’t really saying enough to let it stand on its own two feet the way the first film did. It’s so indebted to the shadow of its sequel that it neglects to tell a complete story, piling backstories and story elements together without thought for where the film itself is headed until like the villainous Spot (Jason Schwartzmann) the movie is more hole than substance. It’s a funny film, heartfelt and clever, buoyed by exceptional visuals and a clear love of its source material, but in attempting to position itself as a fresh update of that material it falls into the trap of its own lack of vision. What is there beyond Spider-Man when Spider-Man is the ground you’re standing on? Maybe the sequel film will have better luck threading that needle, but as it stands Across the Spider Verse spends all its verve and energy only to ooze lifelessly across the finish line.