SPIDER-MAN: FAR FROM HOME
★★★
Like its predecessor, 2016’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, Jon Watts’ Far From Home is essentially a teen-movie peppered with outbursts of super-heroism. After the last film — the first to be MCU-endorsed, and to feature Tom Holland in the titular role — followed the travails of a school year, ending with the titular dance, here a handful of select kids are off on a summer field-trip abroad, the saucy Spider-minx and his adolescent pals undertaking a European Vacation.
So, there’s the sights of Venice and Prague and London, bus rides and flirtations, newly-made alliances and budding romances; all informed by the classic feeling of a school camp, where freedom can be found when far from the familiar school hallways and concerned parents back home. And, gladly, chaperoning them is their science teacher; played, again, by Martin Starr, the one-time Freaks & Geeks geek who is the movie’s secret MVP, his every line-reading a low-key comic delight, as he plays an increasingly-harried token-adult, ill-suited to being a responsibility figure.
Far From Home draws much of its charm from the familiarity of the teen-movie set-up; finding both comedy and drama from the fact that its hero wants, at least for a two-week summer trip, to just be a regular 16-year-old, unconcerned with saving the world or living up to the legacy of Iron Man.
Don't miss a beat with our FREE daily newsletter
The fact Far From Home takes place in a post-Endgame world is announced on opening, where a high-school-news-program ‘In Memoriam’ montage is played for comic effect, employing comic sans text and cross-dissolves and Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You and jpg-compressed/visually-mismatched stills of those recently fallen Avengers (Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Paul Bettany).
The kids at school call the vanishing/returning of Infinity War/Endgame ‘the Blip’: half of them dematerialised only to rematerialise five years later, these revenants the same age, while their old classmates are all five years older. Luckily, for casting and continuity’s sake, our principles from the past pic — Holland, pal Jacob Batalon, love-interest Zendaya, good-girl Angourie Rice — all evidently vanished together, returning for a sequel. And for another film about the awkwardness of adolescence; albeit, this time, more about being telling the truth as a sign of being comfortable in your own skin, rather than the arrival of super-powers being a grand symbol for the onset of puberty.
There’s evocations of the greater MCU — Samuel L Jackson, Cobie Smulders, and Jon Favreau all appear — but mostly we’re existing in a self-contained world. When our friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man is apprised of a grand giant-CGI-monster threat in need of neutralising, he wonders where Thor, Dr Strange, or Captain Marvel might be, instead. His questions are instantly dismissed; this isn’t a crossover or team-up, but very much a standalone movie.
It’s the presence of a new super-hero that gives Far From Home another wrinkle; makes it both a philosophical meta-movie and a home for another bonkers Jake Gyllenhaal performance. He plays Mysterio, fishbowl-helmeted man-of-mystery, who announces his arrival as a man from the multi-verse, a hero from a different version of Earth. But comic-book fans will know his true nature, and the second-half turn finds a descent in a realm of illusions on top of illusions.
As author of this grand magic-trick, Gyllenhaal is clearly evoking the perfectionist director; at once a visionary, a glad-handing team-leader, and a petty tyrant. Every time he says the word, “People!”, it feels like you’re in some group therapeutic space, with the actor channelling a career’s worth of directors; his Mysterio bubbling with a twitchy energy midway between his work in Nightcrawler and Velvet Buzzsaw.
As in all films about blurry-realities and sustained illusions — there’s shades of both Into The Spider-Verse and Inception, particularly in a memorable descent into a symbolist nightmare-state replete with Zombie Iron Man — Far From Home enjoys playing with perception and audience conception. And, ultimately, probably gets a little too addicted to misdirection and revelation, in, "Yoink!" reversals and a host of even-in-the-post-credits-scene twists.
But these aren’t meaningless moments of Shyamalanism, the momentary thrill of disorientation soon revealing the reversal to be nonsensical. Instead, there’s a depth and thought at play in them; or, at least, a teenager-worthy sense of self-consciousness. As Far From Home’s grand-scale super-heroism is revealed to be a sleight-of-hand, a projection of pixels and myth-making, this feels like an interrogation of the super-hero movie itself; from its world-building CGI to our seemingly endless desire for men-in-tights saving the world. “Unless you’re flying around with a cape or shooting lasers out of your hands, no one cares!” the film dares admit; which, unlike the easier trope-mocking jokes about “feigning anonymity and breathing through spandex”, cuts to the core of the whole magilla.
Ultimately, this makes the movie play as pleasingly meta, a Marvel movie in conversation with what being a Marvel movie means. Far From Home is about a holidaying teenager who begrudgingly has to be a super-hero, whilst at the same time being a roadtrip teen-movie that’s begrudgingly a super-hero movie. In such, it’s standard MCU stuff: charming, fun, funny, and, most importantly, self-aware enough to laugh at itself.
