Spider-Man: Far From Home

I have to be completely honest with this review because I have no idea what to think of Spider-Man: Far From Home. It is a fun adventure, yet the jokes do not really land, and the film focuses so much on the superhero aspects that the teenage-summer-trip story seems secondary and brief. The new high school characters are nothing more than small obstacles, and several moments of incorporating the superhero plot points into the teenage story were forced and broke my suspension of disbelief. The pacing and tense action scenes of the film were far more efficient than Spider-Man: Homecoming, but it’s clouded quality of heart and relatability I fell in love with in its predecessor might have been the cost.

The three most outstanding performances were Zendaya, Tom Holland, and Jake Gyllenhall. They really elevate this film to that fun and entertaining energy everyone is talking about. Zendaya’s character, M.J., is great, I have no complaints about that arc and how it was fleshed out, and it mainly stems from the amount of breathing room Zendaya had to just silently convey the development through her brief moments scene-to-scene. Tom Holland does it again as he swings through this film with ease, bringing the emotional core as Peter Parker tries to live up to the mantle Iron Man has supposedly left behind for him. Jake Gyllenhall is fantastic in his performance, but the evolution of Misterio is where this film… falls apart.

This is where I have to delve into spoilers. Misterio is shown as the next protector of earth in the trailers, allegedly traveling from an alternate dimension to prevent his past mistakes from happening to the good people of Peter’s world. Of course, this hero is too good to be true. In the comics, Misterio is a villain, so a majority of Marvel fans already new this revelation before going into theaters. Misterio is the antagonist… but you’re not sure if he is a villain—fully evil and beyond saving. His persona is this selfless survivor teaching from his mistakes, but beneath this lie is an unstable man cheated from success by Tony Stark. Both of those characters have nothing to do with Peter Parker, so when he pretends to be his mentor, you think it is based on the lie to get the glasses, which is the truth, but you don’t know if it fully stops there. Several scenes hint that Misterio is reluctant to kill Peter when he realizes Peter knows the truth, so there is a potential connection with these two characters that I wanted to have developed more. Because of the twist, though, that Misterio is the antagonist, and because the film needs to address it early because a majority of the audience already predicts this, this potential connection as him being Peter’s mentor is scrapped, yet that feeling is still present under the skin. The illusion that there is good in him is also boosted by Jake Gyllenhall’s brilliant performance, because you cannot tell if he is telling the truth or not. I loved Misterio in this film, I wanted them to do more with the humanity of his character and connect him more to Peter, but since this is just a superhero film, there needs to be action.

This entire conflict with the holograms and trickery creates an obstacle of illusion that seems to contaminate the actual craft of this film. Film as a whole is an illusion, but these illusions are not meant to be noticed by the audience—hence the concept of suspension of disbelief—yet this film uses its illusion as a central antagonist. This is an intriguing premise that other films have done (Inception, Arrival, and The Truman Show), but it comes to the point that you cannot trust anything you see. There are scenes added throughout the film that I thought were building to the climax, but it turns out they were just building to the sequel. The scene that completely threw me out of the story was the five-second closeup of the bad guys downloading the drone database into a flash drive and running out of the frame. Yes, Misterio has a crew of Stark employees cheated from success, who all work together to create the holograms, and they all get away because Spider-Man never finds out they exist. I thought Spider-Man would have to chase them down as the last action scene of the film, but it doesn’t happen. A build up during a post credits scene is fine, but injecting these hints in between the final showdown of the superhero conflict and right before the climax of the teenage story led me to believe there was still a story to sit through, which excited me… but then the film ends.

This is where I fail to come to a conclusion: I fell for the magic trick, but because of this I was left wanting more. There are shortcomings throughout the film, standard to many of the MCU films, which would be easily forgiven if I wasn’t cheated out of an entire act of the story. I have to wait possibly two years to find out what happens, so I guess I am trapped in this blood pact I signed with Marvel eleven years ago, even though Avengers: Endgame promised to be the big finale. It’s not that parts of the story are missing, but that the filmmakers forcefully interjected additional threats that do not actually add to the story, and those additional threats will be the antagonists for the next addition to a projected NINE-FILM, MCU-Spider-Man franchise. That sentence alone exhausts me and I have yet to look at the possibly inflated ticket prices for those years. All the buzz about this film has been positive, and I agree that it is entertaining, but the MCU trademarks have reintroduced themselves in this film after their course-corrections with the Russo Brothers’ Captain America: the Winter Soldier, and that bothers me too much for me to enjoy myself.

Story Rating: 6/10

Character Rating: 7/10