Review: Spider-Man: Far From Home

The only real problem with Tom Holland’s first solo film as Spider-Man was that there wasn’t enough of Peter Parker hanging out with his classmates being a regular teen. So what does Spider-Man: Far From Home do? Cut back even further on that stuff – though for a while there it doesn’t look like it, as Holland’s Parker and his classmates first deal with the Thanos-caused five years of being dead (which everyone is calling “The Blip”), then head off to Europe for a class trip.

Obviously all of Parker’s close buddies (and Marisa Tomei’s Aunt May) have also spent the last five years dead so they can remain age-appropriate, but there is a decent joke about one former dweeb who’s now grown into a stud (and yet still comes with them on the class trip). Will Parker finally make it work with MJ (Zendaya)? Will the rest of his class learn anything? Probably not, as their first stop (Venice) is promptly attacked by a giant elemental being that only a mysterious as-yet unnamed superhero (Jake Gyllenhaal) can battle now that the world has no Avengers to rely on. Maybe Parker shouldn’t have been ducking Nick Fury’s phone calls all this time…

There’s a lot of stuff here about “a world without Iron Man” – guess Captain America doesn’t count, though he’s a much more obvious symbol for people to latch onto – and positioning Parker as his successor is one of those weird story beats that feels driven much more by the demands of the MCU than anything that actually suits either character. It’s hardly a deal-breaker and it was probably necessary to differentiate this version from the other two Spider-Men we’ve had on the big screen this century, but giving Peter Parker’s super-hero side regular spider-powers plus a bunch of Iron Man abilities leaves him awfully over-powered for a character who works best as an underdog.

(especially as the MCU can now solve any serious problem with Captain Marvel – they have to bring her up here just to explain why she doesn’t handle things, and presumably they’ll be needing to do that a lot in future)

Everything here fits together just fine, but it probably wouldn’t have hurt to ditch one of the plot threads. Parker’s school stuff works so well that you really only need one extra element and this has two; the Iron Man stuff, and Gyllenhaal’s Quentin Beck, super-powered man from an alternate reality who takes on the name Mysterio (how he gets that name is a decent joke), and comic book fans will have a pretty good idea where things go from there.

This isn’t the first superhero movie where you might end up wishing all the characters hung out a lot more and fought monsters a lot less; Beck is a great father figure for Parker (he’s basically a less snarky Tony Stark), Samuel L Jackson’s Nick Fury is played for laughs just enough to fit in, and even the slightly creepy subplot where former Stark sidekick Happy Hogan is hitting on Aunt May is intentionally creepy for laughs. Also, the fight scenes are merely good, not great (there’s a lot of swirling around in the sky), and even a later twist that forces Spider-Man to rely on his Spider-Sense (also known as his “Peter Tingle”) is never quite as effective as it should be.

All this results in a film that’s charming and fun without ever being fully satisfying, a solid successor to Spider-Man: Homecoming that doesn’t really manage to build on what made that film so refreshing. It does just about everything it goes for right, but it’s trying to do too much; Spider-Man is probably the most straightforward and pure superhero character in the MCU, and he’d work twice as well with half the baggage they’re laying on him.

- Anthony Morris