A “shaggy dog” story is an old-fashioned term for a story that takes a long time being told but the payoff isn’t near as good as the story leading up to it. Usually, it’s told by someone who’s way to enthused into the story that you’re expecting it to be better when all things are said and done. Bill Cosby used to be good at these in his later days before he stopped performing in the 2010s when the reports of sexual assault came to light.
Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse is the prime example of a shaggy dog story. At about two hours and 20 minutes with credits, it’s a good 40-50 minutes way longer than it shold be. The following is going to contain spoilers but you’ll probably thank me. There’s way too many characters to keep track here that most really serve no other purpose but just as Easter eggs. It’s like “The Chris Farley Show” from Saturday Night Live where the filmmakers sat around and said, “Remember that time Donald Glover briefly appeared for no reason in Spider-Man: Homecoming? That was awesome! Let’s get him in this.”
And I’ll be blunt, the whole multiverse thing that started in Avengers: Endgame and has exploded through Loki, Doctor Strange into the Multiverse of Madness and the last two live-action Spider-Man movies, among others, has gone tired fast. This Spider-Man is more in line with Sony’s hold on the property along with producer Avi Arad, but it still has Marvel Entertainment as one of the production companies. This might have been interesting in this movie if the story didn’t just throw it all in your face expecting you to be dazzled by everything you see.
There’s another problem. The animation is too herky-jerky at times it reminds me of the rotoscoping directors would use sometimes in a bad way like Ralph Bakshi and Richard Linklater did. Add to that the endless dialogue of this movie, I felt I need to take a Tylenol for my headache afterwards. Reportedly when Mario Puzo submitted a script for the Superman movies back in the mid-1970s, it was 500 pages. I anticipate this movie had a script similar in length. Everyone is constantly babbling and dropping quips even during the middle of action scenes.
I blame the first Guardians of the Galaxy for this. Because prior to that, the MCU and superhero movies in general had comedic elements, but weren’t totally just non-stop jokes. Even GotG writer James Gunn knew when to make the story more serious. Then, we got Thor: Ragnarok and Spider-Man: Homecoming where almost every line of dialogue seemed to be a joke, a quip or a playful remark. It even spread over into the DCEU with Ezra Miller as Barry Allen/The Flash cracking jokes and even Arthur Curry/Aquaman.
Here, it’s on full display as the quips, remarks, comments, etc., constitutue 85-90 percent of the dialogue that there’s no real story here. Everyone is talking but no one is saying much. There’s a lot of plot exposition but not much of a plot. At one point in the movie, an atlernative Spidey tells our main Spider-Man Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) to please stop talking and I was almost felt it was added by a studio executive upon viewing a rough cut. For some reason, there’s this notion that teenagers today constantly talk all the time and ramble on.
Unfotunately, this makes us hate Miles more because he’s lost all the charm he brought to the previous movie Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse. No, here, it’s all blah-blah-blah like a nine-year-old telling you about a cartoon they watched but spending a good hour when the cartoon wasn’t even 10 minutes. Miles, who is 15-16, and supposed to be in a prep boarding school but still living with his parents, Jeff (Brian Tyree Henry) and Rio (Lauren Velez). It’s never made clear because they ground him for months. And you will hate Jeff and Rio because they play up the “hero complex.” People say they’re a good representation of parents, but they looked more like stereotypical Afro-Latinx bullies. Rio goes overboard with the Spanglish that it’s almost offensive.
Gwen Stacey/Spider-Gwen (Haille Stanford) has come from Earth-65 to Earth-1610 where Miles is battling The Spot (Jason Schwartzman), a scientist that Gwen is also tracking. And somehow they go into all these multiverses to see all the other different Spider-Mans but it grows tired fast. But we discover from the Spot, or Jonathan Ohnn, that Miles was bitten by a spider from a different Earth. Or something like that. All this is one long set-up to a twist that ends on a cliffhanger.
So, yes, this is really only half the story. And the twist is revealed that Miles in the alternative Earth is the badguy known as the Prowler and Gwen bands all the other Spideys together to work in the third movie that probably won’t be out for a while now that the SAG-AFTRA strike has put a stop to things. Almost five years passed since the released of the first Spiderverse movie so if you feel like you need a refresher course upon seeing the third movie, you won’t.
And sometimes “Shaggy Dog” stories have good payoffs. The Big Lebowski and National Lampoon’s Vacation are two good prime examples of “Shaggy Dog” stories. But they were handled a certain way that you didn’t anticipate anything more than what you got. The fact that this movie gives so much plot exposition but tells little of a plot upsets me more because the filmmakers just made a movie that insists upon itself. They think people will flock to it just because it has “cool animation” and throws in all “creative casting” that isn’t too creative.
It’s hard to believe Steinfeld is only in her mid-20s yet she’s been acting since 2010’s True Grit. She is now in the MCU as the new Hawkeye Kate Bishop. She’s really the only good thing about this movie as she understands the pathos of Gwen’s character who has lost Peter Parker in her Earth, a flip on the canon where Gwen is dead in the most famous Spiderverse. But the casting of Karan Soni as Spider-Man India is just a snarky wink to Soni’s hilarious role as Dopinder in the Deadpool movies. But he’s annoying here as it’s just for us to say, “Oh, yeah, it’s him!”
There’s a lot of ideas here, but they don’t mean anything if they can’t be compiled together correctly into a coherent story. Part of the problem is I think the filmmakers of the first one knew they were taking a big risk so they were meticulous in what they did. Even the inclusion of Spider-Ham, which could’ve been done as a pointless joke, was handle perfectly. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller worked on the script for that movie and this one, but there are different directors and it feels like a different movie when it should have continuity. Anthony and Joe Russo were able to build on the Captain America sequels what Joe Johnston did in the frist movie. That’s not the case here.
Say what you will about other superhero movies but at least most of them have stories that are self-contained while dropping hints of the potential sequel. This whole movie sets up the sequel but nothing more and maybe Martin Scorsese is on to something about movie franchises. My main issue with some MCU movies is they are just filler with a mediocre story for two hours setting up the next bigger movie. This is one of those movies. And to be honest, I have no desire to see whatever the third movie is. Even though the WGA strike has ended, the SAG-AFTRA is still ongoing, so the likelihood this will be released anytime within the next couple of years isn’t promising. It took almost five years since the first movie. I don’t think audiences will wait another five years, nor will they care.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 