Avengers: Endgame should by any measure be a tough act to follow. Not only did it climax with a dazzling cornucopia of CGI hero battlestuffs, but in that storyline half Earth’s population was vaporized for five years and several major heroes were killed off for good. Shouldn’t that make-believe planet still be grimly rebuilding, a tad too shaken and solemn for breezy locker-slamming hijinks and Peter Parker making goo-goo eyes at MJ?
Apparently not. Spider-Man: Far From Home swings the MCU right back to center court, namely the tried-and-true tug of war between schoolboy Peter Parker and the outsize demands on his alter-ego. While SM:FFH acknowledges (and purportedly builds on) Endgame, it deliberately slips right back into high-school innocence in a world that shows little evidence of past trauma. (Remember Ant-Man wandering about a shuttered and overgrown San Francisco neighborhood? Well, all’s apparently been rebuilt, just as it was — at least in New York and all of Europe.)
This installment sees Peter Parker (Tom Holland) go on a school “science trip” to Europe with his best friend (Jacob Batalon), MJ (Zendaya), and several classmates. While Parker plots his G-rated aw-shucks schemes to woo MJ (share a headphone splitter!), some sinister dealings are afoot in the form of random evil monster-type things wreaking havoc on various tourist spots. But Spider-Man finds himself upstaged when the first such attack is thwarted by a mysterious bubble-helmeted and crimson-caped superhero shooting green beams from his palms. This is Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal).
Here follows a fun, upbeat, and visually rich summer spectacle, with digital baddies wrecking well-known eurohaunts, much web-slinging, some intrigue, and an awfully heavy dose of Iron-Man-itis.
Some thoughts on this.
First and most critically, you should probably see this movie and you’ll probably enjoy it, since it’s Marvel after all, it cost a cancer-curing fortune to make, it’s going to earn a still larger fortune, and I’d wager that by this point anyone who’s anyone in the blockbuster game worked on this in some way. So it’s good.
That said, SM:FFH feels freighted with the ballast of Endgame and the Iron Man franchise in particular. Producer Kevin Feige just won’t let Iron Man go. (Understandable — Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark was Marvel’s original golden goose.) The need to satisfy the interests of the omnipresent Iron Man storyline continues to constrain Spidey even after Stark’s death. When do we call Uncle here? Poor Peter Parker is Far From Home, but I guess not far enough, since the invisible Hand of Stark routinely reaches from the grave and continues to dominate everything, all the time. This seems unnecessary and a bit cruel for those fans — if any exist — who’d hoped Spider-Man might finally escape Stark’s shadow.
I get that Spider-Man is a kid, and teen-movie dogma dictates that adults must be the butt of some jokes. But I wonder if Marvel went a bit too far with Nick Fury, who comes off here more as a clueless nincompoop than the stalwart mastermind behind the Avengers and SHIELD. It’s a fine line, but SM:FFH regularly belittles Fury without redeeming or otherwise rehabilitating the character. I don’t think he’s meant to be a laughingstock in the MCU, but he’s certainly #trending that way here.
Mysterio and his storyline are, in the end, pretty great. Jake Gyllenhaal is an interesting choice, and vacillates between phoning it in with heavy-lidded deadpan and really going whole hog and over the top in his performance. The latter is more fun to watch, though I daresay Gyllenhaal seems annoyed to be playing a super-villain in a Marvel film. He hams it up in anger, perhaps channeling rage more properly directed at his agent. Either way, it’s a fun ride.
Before I wrap and send you off to see this, let me stretch taut some frustrations over a little wooden ring of discontent and bang on my makeshift drum: Why do Marvel superheroes never fight crime? Why is it always aliens and hand lasers now? Holland’s iteration is the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man in name only; he rights no wrongs, rescues no old ladies from purse snatchers, and doesn’t even save passersby from monstrous attacks. I may be the only one on the picket line here, but I remember better days when comic book heroes stopped criminals (including super-villains, who ultimately were criminals too). Maybe this too is ultimately a casualty of the MCU’s world, one where the only threats worthy of screen time are those that can never really exist.
But let’s be clear: SF:FFH is a fun summer film. The Marvel folks are by now genius at making entertaining blockbuster fare, and it shows. Even newcomers to the MCU (if such a thing exists) will find plenty to like here.
Haus Verdict: Fun, and strikes a nice balance between teen Euro-trip comedy and CGI-heavy web-slinging. Jake Gyllenhaal’s Mysterio is a hoot to watch, and there’s a neat twist — but I wish Marvel would stop pinning Spidey under Tony Stark’s legacy. Maybe next time.
Spider-Man: Far From Home opened everywhere July 5.
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