"If everyone is super, no one will be." - Syndrome
Across the Spider-Verse is visually stunning and certainly entertaining, but comes quite short of its predecessor in emotional power and character development.
This film suffers from a lack of focus. It has so many heroes and villains and plot threads all happening at the same time that none of them really get to develop into anything deep.
We have romance, we have family tension, we have the burden of being spiderman itself, but despite an almost 3 hour run time it feels like none of these things have the time to breathe and flesh out into something new and fresh.
Across the Spider-Verse feels like it treads on very similar territory as the first film. Our characters are older and taller, but still remain very much the same. Covering the same ground twice is like running on a treadmill, and that's why this film feels like an exercise.