Immensely fun & beautiful, with some frustrating flaws

Rating: 8/10 (28 February 2019)

This review contains very minor spoilers

This is an immensely fun and beautiful film. The main characters (Miles, Peter B. Parker, and Gwen) were generally well-developed. And the relationships and banter between that crew was genuinely interesting.
However, the plot ran into some issues. The main villain, Kingpin, for example does have decent motivations that are eventually explained, but he never feels like a real person, largely due to his exaggerated physical appearance. And so the conflicts with Kingpin rarely feel like genuine conflicts, but rather these are forces that are in opposition because it is demanded by the script.
Similarly, 3 of the spider-people (Peni, Noir, & Ham) are under-developed. They are funny, entertaining characters that are pleasing to watch, but because there are so many characters in this film, there simply isn't time to develop all of them and the movie suffers as a result. For example, there is an emotional moment near the end regarding Peni that doesn't work well because her character wasn't built-up enough for that emotional pay-off to work. The result is that the moment feels hollow and insincere, breaking up the pace of the action scene it interrupts. I really like these 3 and I'd like to see more of them, but to bring them into the film all at once and then not develop them or give them true character arcs, makes them feel under-utilized.
Spider-verse is still a very entertaining experience and most of the film succeeds, but it is a bit disappointing to me that what Sony Animation built here is a platform for an amazing film with great performances and gorgeous art-style, but the final film is only very good, and doesn't quite live up to it's potential. I think this film was bit too ambitious, trying to bring in a large crew of heroes and multiple villains, and too many of those pieces were just not properly developed.
The final result is a film that varies from a 7 to a 9 out of 10 throughout its runtime, as it's held back by the aforementioned flaws. And so my final score is a 8/10.