Spider-Man: Far from Home (Columbia Pictures, Pascal Pictures, Marvel Studios, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I continued my excursion through several recent films about young heroes (or heroines) with the latest Spider-Man film, Spider-Man: Far from Home, which judging from the title you might have assumed was a direct sequel to the previous film Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017). It’s actually a sequel to the last movie in the Avengers sequence, Avengers: Endgame, which I hadn’t realized ended with the deaths of quite a few of the Avengers, including cult leader Iron Man a.k.a. Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr., who appears in this film in a flashback sequence), who had been building up Peter Parker a.k.a. Spider-Man (Tom Holland) as his protégé and successor. The plot features the 16-year-old Peter Parker enthusiastic about joining several of his high-school classmates on a trip through various European capitals to visit classic sites associated with science or art, like the Eiffel Tower or the Leonardo da Vinci museum in Venice (and director Jon Watts, who also did Homecoming, gives us a nice, charming shot of water seeping up from under a manhole), only the trip keeps getting interrupted by four super-villains called “Elementals” – after the four classic Greek elements of earth, air, water and fire (though water and fire are the only ones we actually see) – who wreak havoc on the various towns on the tour group’s destination list until they’re successfully fought by one of the few surviving Avengers, Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal, looking surprisingly sexier than he did in Brokeback Mountain 14 years earlier), a new superhero who says he’s from a parallel-universe Earth (if Jerome Bixby really invented the parallel-universe schtick, or at least the first person to introduce it into science fiction, he’s got a lot to answer for) where the Elementals destroyed everyone and everything, including his family. (He nervously fingers his wedding ring as he says that.)

Tony Stark willed Peter Parker a pair of artificial-intelligence glasses containing an operating system called EDITH (which sounds like Stark Industries was marketing a competitor to Alexa and Siri) which can, among other things, summon drone aircraft to take out anyone or anything the wearer wants to get rid of – only Peter has an awful lot of take-this-cup-from-my-lips dialogue to the effect that he doesn’t want to be a superhero, just a nice, ordinary straight teenager interested mostly in getting laid. The person he most wants to get laid with is Mary Jane Watson (Zendaya), though she’s only referred to as “M.J.” (I got the full name from the comic books), who’s also on the tour but Peter’s attempts to chat her up are interrupted by Brad Davis (Remy Hill). In a fit of jealousy, and without really knowing what he’s doing, Peter uses EDITH to order a drone strike on Brad and then has to abort it in a hurry. Eventually Peter agrees to give up the super-glasses to Mysterio after someone has told him he looks ridiculous with them on (as I joked to Charles, “Nobody made fun of Clark Kent’s glasses!” – to which he replied, “People were nicer then”) – and then the writers (Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers – odd to see a big-budget superhero movie with only two writing credits!) pull the big switcheroo: Mysterio, a.k.a. Quentin Beck, is really a super-villain, who’s leading a group of former employees of Tony Stark who are upset that he claimed credit for all the inventions they produced while under his employ. (It’s hard, at least for someone with my anti-capitalist politics, not to feel for them.)

They’ve hatched a revenge plot whose details aren’t made all that clear, but it involves destroying the last remaining Avengers as well as the people on Peter Parker’s school tour (ya remember the school tour?) because they’ve all realized Peter Parker is Spider-Man (in recent years Marvel has got considerably sloppier in keeping their superheroes’ secret identities truly secret) and they’ve caught on to the plot. For the second half this movie goes through so many head-snapping reversals one wonders if Tony Gilroy made some uncredited contributions to the script, and even after its advertised 129-minute running time is over we get a lot of bonus content, including a bizarre scene in which Nick Fury and his girlfriend turn out to be space aliens and part of the crew of a Star Trek-like starship) and alleged bloopers (I suspect a lot of today’s “blooper reels” aren’t accidents from the original shoot but deliberately created content after the fact).

Though some of this may seem to be carping, I actually quite liked Spider-Man: Far From Home, mainly because a lot of it was quite campy and it didn’t have the leaden attempts at “seriousness” that have weighed down many recent superhero films. It’s hardly in the same league as Black Panther – which is like saying that a conventional 1930’s film about newspapers isn’t Citizen Kane – but it’s a nicely watchable, entertaining film that doesn’t take itself too seriously. I must admit that I’ve been somewhat annoyed at the way in which the successive reboots of Spider-Man as a character have turned him younger and less mature each go-round – from Tobey Maguire to Andrew Garfield to Tom Holland in the lead. Yes, a large part of the initial appeal of the Spider-Man comics was the novelty of a superhero who was also a high-school kid with all the usual issues of adolescence – but to my mind the comic-book Spider-Man became a much more interesting character after they aged him out of high school, sent him to college, gave him a new and more mature love interest and made the conflicts in his life more like those of an adult. I do give the filmmakers credit for casting Peter’s guardian, Aunt May Parker, as a relatively young Marisa Tomei and giving her a love interest (Peter’s school science advisor, played by Jon Favreau, who directed the Spider-Man films with Maguire), even though she’s close enough in age to Tom Holland at first I thought she’d turn out to be Peter Parker’s long-lost sister rather than his aunt!