‘Spider-Man: Far From Home’ Film Review: Tom Holland Goes Abroad in Globetrotting Marvel Romp
In a year that’s only half-done, audience members would be forgiven for having superhero fatigue after “Captain Marvel,” “Shazam!” and “Avengers: Endgame.” (It’s almost welcome news that we aren’t getting the next MCU movie until 2020.) But with a focus on character-based comedy, coming-of-age anxieties, and super-battles that exist in very specific geographical locations, returning writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers and director Jon Watts have carved out a space for Spider-Man that feels uniquely breezy and charming while still fitting the larger structure of the Marvel movies. (They even play with that structure, and with deep cuts from the MCU’s history, in very clever ways.)
The film opens with a hilariously earnest piece of exposition — a high-school TV station’s “in memoriam” montage for Tony Stark and others who died in the fight against Thanos, edited together with comic-sans chyrons, inappropriate pop ballads and unlicensed stock images. It’s a breezy way to deal with the MCU’s recent cataclysmic events (we see marching band members, who disappeared in what this film calls “the blip,” reappear in the middle of a basketball game) even though the reverberations of half the population disappearing and then reappearing five years later had to have brought with it actual trauma.
Peter and his core group of friends — Ned (Jacob Batalon), MJ (Zendaya), Betty (Angourie Rice) and Flash (Tony Revolori) — all got blipped, so they’re repeating a year in high school alongside Brad (Remy Hii, “Crazy Rich Asians”), who used to be five years their junior but is now a BMOC. This whole crew is headed to Europe for a summer field trip – one of their chaperones is played by Martin Starr, evolving the geeky high schooler of “Freaks and Geeks” into a geeky high-school teacher — but wouldn’t you know it: There’s a crisis on the continent, and Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) needs the help of one friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.
There’s a totally understandable conflict for Peter, who finds himself stuck between just wanting to see the sights with his friends (and maybe get a kiss from MJ) and his responsibilities as Tony Stark’s heir apparent in a world that is hungering for a “new” Iron Man. And when Spider-Man finds himself fighting alongside the very powerful Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal), a hero from a parallel Earth, Peter thinks he may have found a way to let someone else shoulder the responsibilities of protecting a post-blip planet.
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