Spider-Man: Far From Home is not a bad movie.
But I was disappointed in it. Far From Home suffers from having to follow up the cinematic event that was Avengers: Endgame and while it never attempts to match it in scale, it’s forced to be its own story, a sequel to Spider-Man: Homecoming, and an epilogue for Endgame.
These things don’t always blend well. This is a story about Peter Parker trying to live up to legacy of Iron Man, and deal with some of the mess Tony Stark left behind. It’s also a high school drama about awkward, young love and field trips. The end product is a weirdly-paced and tone-shifting action drama comedy high school romance that…falls neatly into the Marvel formula.
I’m not trying to be one of those annoying nerds that scoffs at the Marvel formula for being too predictable and blah blah blah, except now I guess I am. Obviously the Marvel movies all follow a similar formula — I’ll let you in on a little secret…stories have formulas. :O. I usually don’t care when the Marvel movies are predictable, a little stale, or somewhat forgettable. But this is Spider-Man. My boy, my son, my fave. He deserves better than a screechy villain and a predictable plot. He deserves better than a mediocre movie.
The cast does a great job all around, even that screechy villain isn’t so bad when we’re talking face to face acting scenes. It’s just the plot. The plot is dumb. There are great, solid ideas in the plot. There are solid moments in the plot. But they don’t get a chance to sink in. We’re rushing into the next action sequence or the next joke or…wait it’s the end of the movie. Okay.
Jake Gyllenhaal’s Mysterio is alright. He looks cool. He has a fishbowl on his head, so we gotta give them props for that. His power-set, while it certainly looks awesome, is confusing. The movie does a weird, dumb thing with his character and treats it like it’s groundbreaking. It’s not. It’s predictable and boring.
The couple callbacks to older MCU movies feel bizarrely shoved in — where callbacks worked in Endgame, here they are completely unnatural and corny. I hope this isn’t the beginning of every MCU movie being like ‘remember THIS background character from 17 movies ago??? We love our fans!!!!!’ It was fitting for Endgame, but not every movie can have such unsubtle easter eggs. It feels like the movie is patting itself on the back for being clever.
If you break this movie into pieces, you have plenty of shiny, nice-looking pieces. There are plenty of actually-funny jokes and actually-adorable moments between Peter and MJ. The action scenes are delicious. The special effects are breathtaking. But all mashed up together it just doesn’t fit right.
I’m gonna rate this movie a bag of frozen beans out of 10.
What did you think of Spider-Man: Far From Home? And how about that mid-credits zinger? STRAIGHT FIRE. And hey, can we start a ‘try to make a MCU Spider-Man movie that’s not about Tony Stark’ challenge?
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