Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse Has The Most Perfect Joke Possible, No Notes
Warning: this post contains spoilers for "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse."
The wait is finally over and, nearly five years after the original "Into the Spider-Verse" introduced the first cinematic version of Miles Morales to the world, the beloved Marvel superhero is back in "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse." Much like the 2018 film, producers Phill Lord and Chris Miller helped inject a great deal of humor into the film, having penned the screenplay alongside David Callaham. While there are many, many great jokes peppered throughout the sequel, one joke stands a cut above the rest as not only deeply hilarious but as a demonstration of precisely what makes these films work so well.
Towards the end of the first act of the movie when things are starting to come together and we're beginning to explore some of the other universes within the Spider-Verse, we take a little visit to LEGO Spidey's world. It's only fitting, given that Lord and Miller directed "The LEGO Movie." Oscar Isaac's Miguel O'Hara, aka Spider-Man 2099, gets on the multiversal communicator to speak with this version of Peter Parker, as he detected an anomaly related to the movie's main villain, The Spot.
After the exchange, Miguel — who is all business with no sense of humor through the entire movie — wraps things up with LEGO Spider-Man with a pitch-perfect line. "Thanks, Peter, you're one of our very best," he says, which is one of those jokes, in context, that's a little funny when you first hear it, and gets funnier the longer it lingers. I suppose I can only speak for myself, but my chest hurt from laughter the longer I considered the line juxtaposed against the rest of the film, and what it was trying to accomplish.
Sincerity is the key
"Across the Spider-Verse" opens up the multiverse in a big way, introducing us to a ton of various, impressive Spider-people. Jessica Drew's Spider-Woman, Andy Sandberg's Scarlet Spider, and Daniel Kaluuya's Spider-Punk, just to name a few. LEGO Spidey, on the surface, does not seem nearly as flashy as many of these other iterations of the Marvel hero. Yet, he's part of the team of Spider-people put together by Miguel to help keep the canon intact, cleaning up the mess that was made in the previous film. Not only that, but he's one of the very best of the bunch. The absolutely no-nonsense sincerity of Miguel as a character is what makes the line so damn funny because he absolutely means it.
Sure, this is a beat played for the sake of humor. Naturally, not everyone is going to find this as funny as I personally did. That having been said, the line itself illustrates that Lord and Miller, as well as the directors of these films (in this case Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson), straight-up understand Spider-Man as a character. That "friendly neighborhood Spider-Man" thing, as well as the average kid who winds up both gifted and cursed by superpowers, has always been at the root of what makes him special.
So yes, why couldn't LEGO Spider-Man be one of the best of them? Why not him? Even so, in and amongst a field of seemingly more overtly spectacular Spider-people, it makes for a standout joke — a moment of pure perfection.
"Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse" is in theaters now.