The last Spider-Man movie, “Movie Review: Spider-Man: No Way Home”, was released in December 2021, nearly five years ago. That movie had a plotline that continues into this latest franchise film, where Spider-Man’s two friends, MJ (Zendaya) and Ned Leeds (Jacob Batalon), do not remember who Spider-Man/Peter Parker (Tom Holland) is because, in the last film, the world discovered Spider-Man’s true identity. Peter Parker’s exposed identity caused many serious problems for his friends, forcing him to go to Doctor Strange to reverse time so that Parker could choose certain people in the world who were allowed to know Spider-Man’s true identity. Once again, for Marvel films like this, you have to suspend any level of common sense, and I considered this part of the story one of the most insane ideas within the Marvel franchise.

For this new film, Spider-Man has a new friend, Frank Castle/The Punisher (Jon Bernthal), and Detective Jean DeWolff (Liza Colón-Zayas) – who is one of the lead actors in “The Bear” Hulu series, and visits with his old friend The Hulk(Mark Ruffalo). Florence Pugh also makes an appearance as Yelena Belova/Black Widow, who has all of her scenes in a steam room, which I thought was too off-the-wall an idea.

Spider-Man is also very depressed, having lost his friends, and this time around, fighting nonstop crime is interrupted by some medical issues, with severe headaches that are suggested to be caused by his depression over losing his friends, including the love of his life MJ. He has many other medical issues, including his wrists’ spider ejector either erratically working or not working at all.

The antagonist in this story is a woman named Jean Gray, played by Sadie Sink, who has the ability to invade people’s minds and force them to do whatever she wants, with the one exception being Spider-Man. Later in this story, Gray’s brain control ability increases greatly to being able to control the minds of everybody in New York City. All this creates many scenes of impressive special effects that are as good as, or in some scenes better than, all the previous Spider-Man movies.

I mostly agree with Rotten Tomatoes’ 91% rating, with my rating at 85% and a solid recommendation.