Spider-Man: Far from Home *** (2019, Tom Holland, Samuel L Jackson, Jake Gyllenhaal, Marisa Tomei, Jon Favreau, Zendaya) – Movie Review

Spider-Man: Far from Home is laid back, light hearted, and light weight. It mixes sentimentality with goofy teen laughs, sitcom soap opera and endless CGI action to polished, pleasant, painless effect. They have cleverly made it a must-see as the immediate follow-up to Avengers: Endgame (2019), which they assume we have seen, as it makes little sense otherwise. Its 130 minutes go whizzing by, apart from the last 15 minutes of credits, that is.

Tom Holland’s engaging, exceptionally pleasant Spider-Man trades quips with Jacob Batalon’s Ned Leeds, fancies M J (Zendaya) but lets shyness and suspicion of smug school hunk Brad Davis (Remy Hii) get in  the way, gets bossed around by Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson), gets fussed over by Aunt May Parker (Marisa Tomei), gets rescued by Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) and best of all, befriends Quentin Beck, aka Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal), who is fighting off some Godzilla-sized monsters on Peter Parker’s school trip to Europe, That is Far from Home,  apparently.

A series of incidents – some more interesting than others, some more persuasive than others, replaces an actual plot, but director Jon Watts’s sleight of hand and the actors’ game enthusiasm disguises that quite nicely. There are stretches of the movie where the CGI totally takes over, and you wonder why they are making a completely animated feature.

Script-writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers have done (1) a pretty fair job of linking the film into the Avengers universe as the first post-Avengers: Endgame (2019) movie, (2) a pretty fair job of keeping the banter level going pretty nicely, with some amusing teen-oriented comedy material, even if some of the jokes are flat, stale and xenophobic, and (3) have almost made you forget the Avengers by concentrating on a taut little small-scale Spider-Man movie tale and its mostly useful little team of interesting characters.

Spider-Man: Far from Home is quite fun while it lasts, moving swiftly along, not getting stalled too much between the action. But it is very much a popcorn movie, instantly forgettable, and it isn’t much to write home about.

The soundtrack is very lively. Who needs pictures when you can just little to the music? That you will have to do if you fancy waiting through the endless credits to get to the final scene. That turns out to be a huge letdown as it was shown in the trailer.

The grown-ups are very good value, which is just as well as the movie relies so heavily on them. Samuel L Jackson does the Samuel L Jackson turn again, but he is second billed and has lots to do, and seems nice and engaged. Jake Gyllenhaal is a powerful, compelling presence, given a lot of screen time to emote, turning from light mood to dark dramatically, Marisa Tomei and Jon Favreau are amusing as the comedy relief. Tony Revolori’s Flash Thompson, Angourie Rice’s Betty Brant, Cobie Smulders’s Maria Hill don’t make much of the required impact, and Martin Starr and J B Smoove as the kids chaperone teachers Mr Harrington and Mr Dell are fairly ineffectual and borderline irritating.

Spider-Man: Far From Home is the 11th time the comic book character has appeared on the big screen, but it was Sam Raimi’s original trilogy that rescued the web-spinner from decades of development hell back in the early 2000s: Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man 3 (the highest-grossing Spidey solo movie to date).

© Derek Winnert 2019 Movie Review

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