The Reel Review
This breezy follow-up to 2019’s way more serious Avengers: Endgame follows Spider-Man’s Peter Parker (Tom Holland) on his high school class trip to Europe, where a late night visit from Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) has him torn between hanging out with his would-be girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) and saving the world from a new evil menace targeted by Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal).
This film is more of a teen comedy than a Marvel action-adventure, just loaded with the requisite villains and visual effects. Writing duo Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers (Spider-Man: Homecoming, Ant-Man and the Wasp) seem intent on serving this film’s target audience of teenagers with their own PG-13 brand of Deadpool humor, but despite a few chuckles, most of the jokes fall very, very flat – nowhere near Deadpool caliber. Even a mind-numbing amount of CGI from director Jon Watts (Spider-Man: Homecoming, Clown) can’t mask a juvenile story that is stale, boring and way too long, with corny dialogue that diminishes all the gravitas of Avengers: Endgame. Equally baffling – a couple of bizarre, Matrix-like Spider-Man solo/battle scenes that look like some goofy mash-up of pop art and interpretative dance. And what is up with the bad CGI fishbowl around Gyllenhaal’s head?
Tom Holland does a fine job reprising Spider-Man, but sadly, he has no one to play off of his gullible, guilt-ridden Peter Parker. The rest of the cast (Gyllenhaal, Jackson and Zendaya) all look like they are just waiting to collect their paychecks for sleepwalking through this snoozer of a superhero film.
REEL FACTS
• Spider-Man: Far From Home is the final movie in Phase 3, and 23rd film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe
• Samuel L. Jackson and Jon Favreau appeared in 2008’s Iron Man, the first movie of Marvel’s Phase 1, as well as this final film of Phase 3
• There are two scenes during the end credits.
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