Refreshingly Multicultural

Rating: 7/10 (18 December 2018)

A refreshingly multicultural spin on a genre that has traditionally been predominantly male and predominantly white. What I love about a film like "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" is that a wide range of young kids can watch this film and see in it people who look and sound like them. It resembles the world as it actually exists rather than the worlds of most super hero movies, where white men are constantly saving the day. It also has a funky sound and look to it. The movie teems with urban flavor and the animation, purposely pixelated to recreate the look of an old-fashioned comic book, is gorgeous.
But this is still, disappointingly, a super hero movie, which, if popular sentiment is any indication, is pretty much a problem only for me. That's fine, I can live with that knowledge. The movie is just so formulaic, with a draggy central story line about a kid whose insecurity prevents him from rising to his full super hero potential until....guess what?....he does. There's one (or a few) too many scenes with other characters giving him lectures about how to become his true self, etc. etc. And the story is weak, a confusing mish-mosh of villains and mega-weapons and alternate universes. True to super hero movie conventions, the filmmakers try to disguise how messy the screenplay is by burying it under an avalanche of loud, hectic action scenes that throw a lot of stuff at us and hope something sticks.
So my dislike of super hero movies and everything that comes with them prevented me from fully enjoying this movie, but if I'm going to watch a super hero movie at all I want more that look and sound like this one.
Grade: B+