Well, they can’t all be winners. Spider-Man: Far From Home, the final film in the Infinity War/Endgame saga, is a movie that struggles to reach the heights of the current run. While the movie does try and push the character forward, it’s like Peter Parker has to walk through mud to get himself away from the drama in the MCU. Director Jon Watts tries admirably, as the movie contains many well done sequences, he just cannot make it into a completely satisfying whole.
There’s a fun premise here that gets to the root of why many people love the Spider-Man stories. All Peter (Tom Holland) wants to do is enjoy a summer trip to Europe and tell MJ (Zendaya) how he feels. But superheroes, be they friendly neighborhood ones or otherwise, don’t really get breaks, and his vacation is interrupted by Elementals. He joins the battle reluctantly and meets new superhero Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal). From there things only get more confusing and chaotic, as an even bigger threat emerges.
I often knew what I was supposed to be feeling in the moment with Spider-Man: Far From Home, and yet the emotions did not come. Even as the movie was trying to dazzle me technically, I still did not jive completely with what it was throwing at me. It might be due to the truly silly way the movie moves everyone from place to place (the chaperones are just going to deviate from the planned trip route of a group of high school students??) or the fact that Jake Gyllenhaal’s acting ability was nowhere to be found for half this film.
But more than that, Spider-Man: Far From Home is one of the few films in the MCU that suffers from having too much connective tissue. Yes, it’s nice to know what happened in the five year gap between when the snap and when the Avengers saved the world, but this movie over does it in every respect. Most egregiously, this movie seems driven to recontextualize Tony Stark’s already firmly establish presence in the MCU.
I know Marvel has a deal in place with Sony and is heavily involved in these stories but I often found the movie trying to play on the sympathy of his death to the detriment of Peter’s journey. No one in the world of the MCU would ever expectt a high schooler to step up to the mantle of leader and they definitely aren’t asking if Spider-Man is going to be the next Iron Man. This flies in the face of the characters they’ve recently established, namely T’Challa and Captain Marvel. Who the hell thinks that Spider-Man is going to be the next Iron Man?
This movie also repeats beats of other stories. This is about the third or fourth film in the phase to be about “sins of the father” as the villains all have ties to a now dead Tony Stark. One would think that made the movie more elevated, but honestly, it was just silly. Tony is gone (RIP) so having to go through and deal with any of his previous mistakes at this point isn’t going to land, especially when the character of Spider-Man so desperately needs to land on his own.
Peter’s struggle between being a high schooler and a hero is a good story to tell, but defining him outside his relationship to Tony, and his technology, is far more effective. The scenes with MJ, and his nemesis Brad, thrill in a way a battle against the Elementals and his struggles with being an Iron Man protege do not. Hopefully, they remember this for the third film because if not, this will be a series of diminishing returns.