Pan and Slam

Movie Review: Spider-Man: Far From Home

Click above to hear the review.

PG-13 | 2h 9min

by Jason Koenigsberg

The first major Marvel movie to be released since Avengers: Endgame is here. Sadly, this is just more of the same from Marvel Studios only dumber than their average film with lazier writing. I felt that Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) was a decent film only it aimed to please children and seemed more like a movie just for kids rather than all audiences. Well with Spider-Man: Far From Home they allowed the characters to grow up slightly but fitted them with scenarios that are much more asinine than the ones Tom Holland’s Spider-man faced in his first full-length movie. 

The opening shot is of a statue and a car driving by. It then reveals that we are in Mexico and we see Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury and meet Jake Gyllenhaal as Mysterio and the movie gets jumps into the action right away. It then immediately cuts to Marvel’s trademark cutesy humor with a fake in memoriam dedication and jokes related to Endgame. That is really all there is to Spider-Man: Far From Home all of its run time can be divided up into three sections. One-third of the movie is dialogue and exposition, another third of the movie is nothing but the run of the mill CGI action sequences, and the final third of the movie is cheesy humor that mostly falls flat. A lot of the jokes involve teenage awkwardness and they are tastefully done, just nothing that deserves a laugh out loud moment from the viewer. Plus, it was refreshing to see Spider-Man outside of New York and in some exotic cities throughout Europe such as London, Venice, and Prague. If that sounds appealing enough then Spider-Man: Far From Home might satisfy your summer movie needs.

The key word in that last sentence is MIGHT because there are other problems with this movie. Some shot-reverse-shot edits do not match and that is just laziness on the filmmakers part. As pathetic as those quick moments are, they do not hold a candle to the laziness involved in the screenplay. Spider-Man: Far From Home expects the audience to believe in some very elaborate far-fetched plot contrivances, far more ridiculous than the usual Marvel movie. Moments come along and reveal themselves to be holograms with thousands of drones being launched from a Stark Industries satellite only to help advance the shoddy plot. The anti-drone message about the dangers of technology and the social commentary about fake news deserve some credit for trying to add depth and make Spider-Man: Far From Home political, but the way the script went about it made it feel more like a cop-out. It was reminiscent of a Rick and Morty episode where aliens kidnap Rick in order to obtain some scientific secret about concentrated dark matter that only he knows so they put him inside a simulation, inside a simulation, inside another simulation to trick him. The best part of Spider-Man: Far From Home is a cameo and a reveal in the first post credit scene, other than that audiences should stay home instead of checking out what happens when Spider-man goes on vacation. 

Here is the funny clip from Rick and Morty referenced above.