Warning: Review Contains Spoilers
The unique business relationship that Sony and Disney are in when it comes to Spider-Man should be something of a disaster. Honestly I’m kind of surprised either party were willing to do it in the first place. It was in Marvel’s interest to keep letting Sony flail and make bad Spider-Man movies until they gave up the IP like Fox did with Daredevil and it was in Sony’s interest to make Spider-Man movies on their own in hopes that they could find a way to make it work and keep all the profits. Instead they came up with a surprisingly user-friendly deal that would have Marvel’s creative team bring Spider-Man into the MCU while having Sony front the bills and distribute the final product. And somehow it worked. 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming was a great Spider-Man movie and a solid piece of the MCU puzzle, it was a win for everyone involved. Of course the downside of the deal is that while the core Spider-Man films with Tom Holland they can also pretty much do whatever they want with the rest of the IP, meaning the market gets to be saturated with Spider-Man product both good (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse) and bad (Venom) and if they’re not careful we could become very sick of this character very quickly. Fortunately we’re not at that point yet and as such I was still pretty excited for Spider-Man: Far From Home.
Picking up the summer after the events of Avengers: Endgame, the film finds Peter Parker (Tom Holland) mourning the loss of Tony Stark but excited about his upcoming school trip to Europe. He’s looking forward to this trip firstly because he needs a break and secondly because he has this elaborate plan to woo Mary Jane (Zendaya) out of the friend-zone over the course of the trip, but all those plans get put on hold when he’s contacted by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), who wants to use Parker to deal with a situation while he’s on his trip. Parker is reluctant to help and wants to spend the trip being a normal teenager, but after his tour group is attacked by a water monster he realizes he’s going to be brought in one way or another. So he goes with Fury and meets Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal), a person from an alternate dimension whose world was destroyed by the same elemental monsters that appear to be emerging on Earth now. Mysterio seems to be a much more conventionally powerful hero than Spider-Man but will their combined powers be enough to do the job?
So, just from looking at that plot description you can probably intuit one of the film’s biggest problems: its first half is largely predicated on the idea that famous supervillain Mysterio is a good guy and the film seems to treat it as a genuine surprise when this turns out not to be the case. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with Spider-Man’s history will immediately see through this villain’s scheme given that his whole thing has historically been to create illusions to manipulate his foes. Even people who know nothing about the original character should more or less see this twist coming so it’s a little surprising that the film does bother to treat it like a genuine twist. That having been said I do like what the film does with the Mysterio character overall. The guy has style and even though his reveal was predictable the film actually did manage to make the inevitable exposition dump about what he’s been doing sort of work for him. I also like how they seem to be establishing a continuity of sorts between the spider-man villains in this series by making them people who are disaffected because of the seemingly benevolent corporate actions of Tony Stark whether it’s the displaced small businessman take on The Vulture from the last movie or the disgruntled middle-management level employees who make up Mysterio and his team.
Lame plot twist aside I was a bit disengaged by the film’s whole first half, which needed to do a lot to reconcile the post-Avengers: Endgame world from the down to earth perspective of Parker’s high school while also going through the franchises’ established high school shenanigans. At times during this first half the comedy goes a bit too far; characters make dumb decisions and get into contrived situations to accommodate punchlines, some of the jokes just flat-out don’t work, and there’s generally a feeling of the movie throwing a whole lot at the wall to see what sticks. You’re still enjoying the proceedings but its sloppy and something just seems off about it. However, once the film gets the twist out of the way it finally recovers and becomes the MCU Spider-Man adventure that we were waiting for. Parker is finally given a real goal in all of this and we get to stop pretending that these goofy CGI elemental monsters are a real threat. The mix of comedy, action, and character gets back on track and the film just generally seems to tighten up and things seem to finally matter again. So, yeah, despite some early stumbles the movie manages to recover and become another pretty strong piece of studio entertainment from Marvel that manages to be both an effective sequel to the last movie while furthering the overall story, which is something that this studio routinely makes look easy.
***1/2 out of Five
The Movie Vampire 