The rationale of giving the fans all the canon they want and deserve was trotted out once more when The Hunger Games divvied up Mockingjay, though the comparative thinness of those two films gave the impression of a studio realizing they could charge loyalist moviegoers twice instead of once. The issue began in earnest with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which stretched its source material’s seventh book into an eighth movie for the stated reason of “creative imperative”, a euphemism for not wanting to excise any detail from a doorstopper of a novel. The initial instinct might be to blame Lord of the Rings, a series that ended its first installment with the official beginning of its main quest, but Peter Jackson gave each piece of his trilogy enough rising and falling action to hold up as a freestanding work.
The feeling that we’ve spent an entire run time waiting for all the stuff to happen is spreading like an epidemic, traceable back to the scourge of the two-part franchise picture. The dimension-hopping gang will be back next spring in Beyond the Spider-Verse.
In the case of our latest outing in the Spider-Verse, a conclusive explanation presents itself with the final title card: we’ve only seen the first half of the movie.
During the web-head’s latest cartoon adventure, however, one gets the inkling of happy immoderation, the same inability or unwillingness to part with any of the good stuff that elongated John Wick: Chapter 4 past the point of wearing out its welcome. But these schematics were established to be broken, meant to offer a template that the best movies defy as they harmonize form with content. Going by the classical architecture of the screenplay construction books, the first act lasts several beats longer than prescribed, with a hazy, indefinite transition from the second to the third that leaves a sense of sprawling middle with no end. Where the last installment slingshotted its audience through a taut, rewarding and complete remix of Spidey mythology, this one – which clocks in well past the two-hour mark – lags behind its own allegro rhythm, sluggish as Miles Morales weightlessly web-slings through a bustling Manhattan. And yet for all its cleverness in conception and design, the overall quotient of pound-for-pound entertainment has slipped in a difficult-to-pinpoint way.
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