Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) review

Middle School student Miles (voiced by Shameik Moore) gets bitten by one of those damned radioactive spiders (activate: sticky hands), witnesses the real Spider-Man (Chris Pine) get killed trying to stop the box-shaped Kingpin (Liev Schreiber) from using a particle accelerator to bring his deceased wife and child back to life and gets introduced to five (!) different Spider-people from other dimensions ... who teach Miles how to harness his new-found powers. If you're going to do a comic book movie, this is - to me, at least - how it should be done from a visual perspective: colorful, bouncy, not restrained by one style, not afraid to be ridiculous or throw in unorthodox characters like Spider-Ham (comedian John Mulaney) or Spider-Man Noir (Nicolas Cage) or even the anime-inspired SP//dr (Kimiko Glenn), who operates a cute tank. Sure, it strains itself trying to explain it all - and the wall-to-wall music is just a bit too much - but I found it, for the most part, to be a refreshing alteration of the Marvel Formula. And if they don't realize a Spider-Man Noir feature (again, with Cage) should be the next thing they should be drafting, there's no hope for them....