Finally decided to watch it.
What happens when you scrape together a shit ton of old stale crap and dump it all over the MCU Spider-Man franchise? You get 'No Way Home'. Being reminded of all those bad movie versions of iconic Spider-Man villains does not make for a good movie.
The metallic version of Green Goblin was always bad. No one needed to be reminded of Jamie Fox's race-swapped Electro (funnily enough, pairing electric powers with black characters was considered a racist trope back in the nineties). Did they ever explain why Octavius wasn't a shredded bullet sponge? Did the Lizard even have a role to play? I can't even recall the motivation for Sandman from the 'original' movie or what compelled him. And where was Venom? (Aside from the end sequence bit part.) They were obviously going for a 'multi-dimensional' Sinister Six approach. Venom would have at least made having three Spider-Men worth the time.
What else sucked?
- Somehow coming up with solutions to all these 'supervillains'' problems within a couple of hours in a high school laboratory.
- Why would MIT be a problem? Stark Enterprises via Happy would probably remove this obstacle with the snap of a finger. Why would he turn to Dr. Strange for a solution?
- And why was Dr. Strange rushing into dangerous spells without carefully planning the perimeters? It went wrong because Dr. Strange allegedly had to modify the spell mid-casting. He was also a medical doctor, which means he should know that good preparation is one half of a successful surgical procedure.
- When things went wrong, they didn't go back to Dr. Strange and instead tried to solve it themselves.
- Where was Wong? He may have decided to stay out of things, but once the fabric of reality was ripping apart, he should have returned.
- Where were the Avengers? This screamed an Avenger problem as soon as the Sinister Six appeared. In the comics, Spider-Man always had help dealing with all six.
Tobey Maguire looked like shit by the way.
So you know nothing about Spider-Man and didn't watch the film, got it.
Peter Parker is one of the smartest characters in the comics, he's up there with Reed Richards, Bruce Banner, Tony Stark, and the more recent DEIverse additions that includes Black Panther and Moon Girl. He invented not only his webshooters in most versions of the comic, but the webbing used in them.
Both previous versions of Spider-Man explicitly spell out they know how to cure Green Goblin and Lizard because they have either been working on it for years [Green Goblin], or already done so [Lizard - and again highlighting just how smart Peter is at having done this in the first ASM film].
Doc Ock only needed the AI in his arms controlled, which he himself managed at the end of Spider-Man 2 through sheer willpower anyway, so using the entirety of Stark Tech to come up with a chip to do just that isn't the biggest leap since that's the general premise of Tony and Ironman anyway.
Sandman literally shows up helping Spider-Man when they both meet Electro, and only really runs when shit turns south in the apartment. He was at best an anti-hero who repeatedly makes bad judgement calls and gets labelled as a villain because of it.
As for Electro, same problem with most villains, Sinister Six lineup in particular, too much power, goes insane. Green Goblin is the same, as is Doc Ock. The human brain is not built for these things and when it happens things go bad. Something that's a fairly regular point throughout Marvel comics, and the whole point of the film in trying to cure the villains who for the most part never asked for any of this to happen to them.
Green Goblin: Took the serum on his own, his fault, and one of the few to actually be in that position.
Doc Ock: Lab/experiment accident breaks the control chip, arm AI takes over.
Sandman: Wrong place, wrong time, gets turned into living sand.
Electro: Falls into a vat of eels.
Bad things happen to them, and bad things follow, but for 3 of the 4 said bad things happening to them were not because they chose it to happen. That's why Peter is trying to redeem them.
He's messing with the timelines of several multiverses. It just doesn't make sense.
And it's a high school lab. They aren't in the habit of carrying chemical and biological agents capable of the things Parker wanted them for. It's stupid.