...this is pretty much the entire first half hour of the film.
What starts out as a fitting and rather well-done tribute to those lost during Endgame (weirdly set to Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You") in the first few minutes turns into a film that spends a third of its run time praising a man who destroyed all of his company's weapons in order to build a bigger, more more destructive one and then about forty-seven variations of that, created an artificial intelligence that nearly ended the world as well as killed several thousand people and received no blame for it, willingly handed control over his team to a government that could still be crawling with HYDRA agents for all he knew, then fought and criminalized many of his friends when they didn't want to go along with it, manipulated a teenage boy from Queens into being his own personal soldier, and was apologetic for literally none of it before doing what was literally the least he could have done and sacrificing himself for the greater good.
So. CAN WE PLEASE STOP TRYING TO PASS OFF MCU TONY AS A GOOD GUY ALREADY?!
HE REALLY, REALLY WASN'T!
Spider-Man: Far From Home picks us up a few months after what people are calling "The Blip". For the record, "the Snap" was a far better name for it. While I'm aware not everyone was privy to the events that happened in Wakanda, they really should have been more than a little aware of what happened to the Avengers Complex considering it was blasted into atoms. Not to mention the absolutely staggering amount of hero worship that Tony gets even now. But now, people are back five years later. For Midtown High, that means several students who were gone have to restart the academic year, including Peter Parker (Tom Holland). Conveniently, all of his classmates that are returning or recurring characters were among those caught in the snap, and thus are still the same age that he is!
But now, it's time for Spider-Man to go abroad! A class field trip alongside his best buddy Ned (Jacob Batalon) and his now suddenly right the hell out of nowhere love interest Michelle (Zendaya). What's that? Why am I not calling her MJ? Because she's not Mary Jane, and the use of the initials to try to insist that she is is just as insulting as it was in the previous film, but I'll get to that in a little bit.
So, off to Europe they go, Peter questioning himself as taking Tony Stark's place in the world as the New Iron Man as he tries to balance his schooling and his budding feelings for Michelle and how to act on them. But soon Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) arrives with a mission for Peter, to help the enigmatic Quentin Beck (Jake Gyllenhaal) battle a sinister force from another reality known as the Elementals and...yeah, no. Sorry. This only counts as a spoiler if you have literally never seen anything Spider-Man related ever.
Quentin Beck is Mysterio and Mysterio is a bad guy.
I'll give you a moment to recover from the shock you don't have because you're not a brain-damaged two year old who has spent that time living in a cave near the center of the Earth.
To his credit, Gyllenhaal plays Beck well, so much so that you might just think they're going to run the other way with it. However, canon inevitably wins out in some way. Avoiding spoilers, his motivations are very believable and he's even sympathetic...to a point that he quickly drives past as he descends into third rate villainy.
The supporting cast does well. Samuel L. Jackson and Cobie Smulders do great in their roles. Jon Favreau is back as Happy Hogan, which is always a plus. Martin Starr is back as Mr. Harrington, one of Peter's teachers, and is joined by J.B. Smoove as another teacher from Midtown and probably one of the funniest parts of the film. Praise has already been heaped on both Gyllenhaal and Holland for their roles as Beck and Peter, respectively. It's honestly kind of a shame they did go the route that they did, since their chemistry was pretty good and they could have made a good team.
Alas, it was all a lie.
Which comes to some of the bad, I'm sad to say. I'm happy to say that Not-Flash Thompson (Tony Revolori) is back in a far less substantial role than in Homecoming and he's come up with slightly better insults than "Penis Parker". He also gets punched in the face, which is so glorious after his really, really terrible role in Homecoming. I'm unhappy to say that Michelle does have a bigger role than in the last film...and I'll go ahead and preface this by saying that I have no opinion on Zendaya's performances beyond she plays the role she's given well.
But my problem is...she's a completely original character who is completely unlike anything that Mary Jane Watson has ever been or is...so why are you calling her MJ? I had said in my Homecoming review that it felt like it was something done by Marvel and Sony strictly to piss off the comic purists and I meant it, because it felt like that mention of her name was thrown in as an afterthought. But as they're sticking with it, I'll forego the usual argument that she's nothing like Mary Jane Watson.
She's also nothing like she was in the last film.
The out of nowhere conspiracy theory-ing and the interest in the macabre is...out of nowhere. Her awkwardness around Peter is out of nowhere. The sudden romance between her and Peter is out of nowhere. I feel that either Sony didn't get a memo or that certain scenes must have been either cut from the finished film or cut entirely before shooting. There really can't have been that much character development between Endgame and Far From Home because, newsflash...these people were dead.
They weren't trapped in another dimension such as within the Soul Stone. They weren't frozen in polar ice or trapped in a time loop...they were dead. You cannot develop a character when they're dead.
...okay, you can, but not in this context.
So I would have liked to have seen this built up more rather than just throwing it out of nowhere. Even if Peter had interest in Michelle, we saw no evidence of the inverse being true beyond her mentioning she knew his schedule...which I'd honestly chalked up to her being observant, as she'd said. The problem is that not only is she completely opposed to the character she's supposed to be (rather like Flash in these films), but she's also completely opposed to her character in the last time. Again, they were dead in that time. What changed? Why the change?
I guess that wasn't important compared to forcing a romance.
Not to say that Holland and Zendaya don't have chemistry, because they do...in that awkward teenagers in love sort of way. I'm not saying it can't work. I'm saying we have no evidence of any build up to it. Michelle could be a potentially interest character in her own right and potentially even a good love interest, but there has to be some kind of development.
To give a good example of this done correctly - the relationship of Steve Rogers and Peggy Carter. Say what you will about Steve going back on character development (and some will, I won't), their romance was built up over the course of an entire film. It wasn't the main plot or the focus, but it was there, just little touches here and there. Sometimes it could be something so subtle as just a glance, not even a full conversation, just a glance. But it was there. That made their kiss before Steve hopped onto the Red Skull's doomship and the last radio message all the more meaningful. Dare I say, beautifully tragic.
That scene led me to getting the sniffles when they finally reunited at the end of Endgame. When Peter and Michelle kiss in this film for the first time? Not even a minor heart-string vibration.
I'm aware the circumstances are different. I guess you could call them "cute" or "awkward" and I have done at least one of those things in this very review, but it's just not that great. Then again, maybe it's some subtle commentary on teenage love and Sony just blew all of our minds.
...nah, they're not that clever.
Also, still no spoilers, I was happy to see JK Simmons back in the mid-credits scene and the post-credits scene lets us know that the MCU might still have some very interesting directions to take. I do recommend Far From Home, but only conditionally. It has some road bumps (the two major ones that I've detailed in great detail) and the blemishes are not beautiful on this one. The film is no Guardians of the Galaxy or Winter Soldier in terms of quality, but it is enjoyable. For me, that is enough.
Spider-Man: Far From Home is now in theaters from Columbia Pictures, Marvel Studios, and Pascal Pictures.
For the latest from the MadCapMunchkin, be sure to follow him on Twitter @MadCapMunchkin
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