Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

An often breathtakingly tedious sequel, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse follows Shameik Moore’s Miles Morales as he ventures into the multiverse after a new villain (Jason Schwartzman’s The Spot) arrives on the scene. Filmmakers Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson deliver a wildly overlong endeavor that remains hopelessly unable to hold the viewer’s interest for more than a minute at a time, as the movie, written by Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, and David Callaham, boasts a relentlessly frenetic feel that slowly-but-surely renders its few positive attributes moot – which is a shame, certainly, given that the picture admittedly does possess several strong voice performances and a vibrant, innovative animation style. And while the movie contains a small handful of genuinely compelling sequences, including a terrific scene detailing the honest heart-to-heart conversation between Miles and his concerned mother (Luna Lauren Vélez’s Rio), Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse‘s frenzied atmosphere ensures that every single one of its padded-out action sequences wears out its welcome almost immediately (ie they are, to an increasingly disastrous degree, just an exhausting, endless assault on the senses). By the time the interminable final third rolls around, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse has confirmed its place as a complete trainwreck of a motion picture that has absolutely no business running an astonishing, seemingly never-ending 140 minutes.

1/2* out of ****