Highly Recommended
This is our warming dessert after the emotionally heavy meal of Endgame, a shamelessly exuberant high school movie that just happens to feature our friendly neighbourhood Spider-Friend.
Where do you go after Avengers: Endgame? It’s a question that any number of listicles has tried to answer in the days, weeks, and months following one of the biggest box office hits of all time. If you’re the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and you have a multi-picture arrangement with Sony, then you just try to have some fun with it.
Picking up shortly after the events of Endgame, Peter Parker (Tom Holland) is feeling the pressure to become the next Iron Man. Excited for a European trip with his school group, and the chance to tell M.J. (Zendaya) how he feels about her, his bliss is interrupted when super spies Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) arrive with new hero Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal) to ask for Spider-Man’s help to save the world.
If SPIDER-MAN: FAR FROM HOME feels like it is burdened by the continuity of the MCU, it’s a totally ordinary response for a 16-year-old hero saddled with great responsibility. So director Jon Watts and writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers (Spider-Man: Homecoming, Ant-Man and the Wasp) try to lighten that load by delivering a throwback European vacation flick with a surface level parody of several sovereign nations.
It’s a loose narrative glue that holds the twenty-third film in the MCU together, relaying partly on audience familiarity with the characters as well as shorthand plots for a handful of throwaway gags. Case in point is the relationship between Ned (Jacob Batalon) and Betty (Angourie Rice), a comedy routine that comes straight out of a John Hughes tradition. Yet this allows the audience to ease into the glorious chaos and slapstick tone that sees the acrobatic Parker struggling with Stark tech, avoiding discovery, or awkwardly crushing on M.J.
The film really breaks loose is during the moments when Mysterio is on the screen. Whether fighting a giant Elemental monster in the canals of Venice or the streets of Prague, or plunging the audience into a topsy turvy world that rivals the Batman villain Scarecrow. The visual effects are on par with anything else in the MCU, an “Avengers level threat” if you will. Mysterio is a character made for the cinema, and these visual moments are something fans have waited decades to see.
In his fifth outing in the costume, Holland’s earnestness continues to be the best version of Peter Parker on screen. (Please don’t send me angry emails or tweets). Now fully established as M.J., Zendaya has a more rounded and relatable character that is distinct from previous portrayals. The return of Jon Favreau and Marisa Tomei is always something to be excited about, especially given that Aunt Man seems to continue having a thing for Stark employees. Less successful is the presence of Martin Starr and J.B. Smoove as the teachers, stuck with some lame dialogue and a lack of real purpose.
SPIDER-MAN: FAR FROM HOME is the epilogue to the Infinity Saga, and a palate cleanser before the presumed announcement of Phase 4 at Comic-Con in July. Some of that future is teased in a pair of now traditional end-credits sequences that really shift the baseplates for both the character and the franchise. While purists may quibble at the comic book accuracies of some of the characters, this is one of the most tonally faithful sequels since Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2.
2019 | US | DIR: Jon Watts | WRITER: Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers| CAST: Tom Holland, Samuel L. Jackson, Zendaya, Cobie Smulders, Jon Favreau, J. B. Smoove, Jacob Batalon, Martin Starr, Marisa Tomei, Jake Gyllenhaal | DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures Releasing (AUS) | RUNNING TIME: 129 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 1 July 2019 (AUS)
