Spi­der-Man: Far From Home

At the end of 2017’s Spi­der-Man: Home­com­ing, Peter Park­er (Tom Hol­land) was right where he need­ed to be. Not just liv­ing in Queens with his aunt May (Marisa Tomei) but also in the sense of hav­ing made a promise to him­self to not let his respon­si­bil­i­ties as a super­hero pre­vent him from lead­ing a nor­mal teenage life. At the Avengers’ new­ly remod­elled upstate HQ, Parker’s men­tor, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr), offered to make him a ful­ly paid-up mem­ber of the team. Instead he pledged to keep his feet firm­ly on the ground.

Since then, every­thing and noth­ing has changed. In Spi­der-Man: Far From Home, Parker’s world looks much the same as it did two years ago. He’s still fig­ur­ing out what it means to be a high school kid with spe­cial abil­i­ties and a secret iden­ti­ty, still wait­ing for the right moment to tell MJ (Zen­daya) how he real­ly feels about her, still mor­ti­fied by May’s evi­dent­ly active sex life. Only now he’s minus a father fig­ure again, Stark hav­ing bit­ten the dust last time out through a sac­ri­fi­cial act that final­ly saw the Infin­i­ty Stones destroyed (belat­ed spoilers).

Stark’s absence, as well as that of sev­er­al oth­er Avengers, extends far beyond Peter’s purview. The entire plan­et is slow­ly but sure­ly recov­er­ing from the shock of ​‘the blip’, which saw half of all life in the uni­verse van­ish only to snap back into exis­tence just as sud­den­ly. Yet while this momen­tary mass extinc­tion event rais­es a lot of ques­tions, return­ing series direc­tor Jon Watts and screen­writ­ers Chris McKen­na and Erik Som­mers don’t allow their film to become bogged down by the epic con­clu­sion to Endgame and all its messy, earth-shat­ter­ing ramifications.

With Thanos firm­ly in the MCU’s rearview, they’re free to focus on advanc­ing Parker’s per­son­al jour­ney. For those who have found some of Marvel’s recent out­put to be bloat­ed and self-seri­ous, this will come as a wel­come ton­ic. Because if the prospect of two plus hours of ​‘Spidey Takes a Vaca­tion’ seems some­what friv­o­lous, in many ways this is a nec­es­sary palate cleanser – a chance for the stu­dio to get back to doing zip­py spec­ta­cle on a more mod­est scale. Giv­en every­thing that’s hap­pened to Park­er, how­ev­er, it’s rea­son­able to expect him to have done a bit more grow­ing up by now.

As Park­er and his class­mates – includ­ing Ned (Jacob Bat­alon), Bet­ty (Angourie Rice) and Brad (Remy Hii), the lat­ter a blipee whose accel­er­at­ed phys­i­cal growth serves as both the film’s strongest recur­ring gag and a reminder that real matu­ri­ty comes from with­in – set off on their Euro jol­ly, a mas­sive sand mon­ster wreaks hav­oc on a Mex­i­can vil­lage. It’s one of four ​“Ele­men­tals” which have arrived on Earth with the sole aim of caus­ing as much destruc­tion as pos­si­ble, and you can guess where the next one is about to spring up.

With Thor off-world and Cap­tain Mar­vel unavail­able, S.H.I.E.L.D hype man Nick Fury (Samuel L Jack­son) implores Park­er to take action. The world needs the next Iron Man to step for­ward, and with Stark hav­ing passed the torch to his plucky young pro­tégé both fig­u­ra­tive­ly and lit­er­al­ly in the form of a piece of wear­able tech with awe­some capa­bil­i­ties, Park­er is left with seem­ing­ly no choice but to park his crush and suit up. That’s eas­i­er said than done though, as his intu­itive extra sense is cur­rent­ly being cloud­ed by anoth­er kind of tin­gling sensation.

Enter Quentin Beck aka Mys­te­rio (Jake Gyl­len­haal), a caped do-good­er with an up-and-at-’em atti­tude and vague­ly defined cos­mic pow­ers (whose back­sto­ry dif­fers marked­ly from the comics). Beck looks legit, but there’s a sus­pi­cion he’s mere­ly play­ing the part of a super­hero. At one point he even feeds Park­er a stock line about how sav­ing the world requires sac­ri­fice, how some­times peo­ple die, as if he didn’t already know that. It’s sur­pris­ing, then, to see Park­er accept Beck at face val­ue, no ques­tions asked. Did Stark not teach him to be sharp­er and savvi­er than that?

Ulti­mate­ly, Mys­te­rio doesn’t pose all that great a threat to Park­er – like Michael Keaton’s Vul­ture, he’s lit­tle more than a pesky dis­trac­tion from the oth­er urgent mat­ter at hand. And yet for all that Hol­land has brought the char­ac­ter on leaps and bounds from the Maguire/​Garfield eras, Parker’s com­ing-of-age arc is stuck in a famil­iar hold­ing pat­tern. Want­i­ng to be the best friend­ly neigh­bour­hood Spi­der-Man he can be while also just being a kid is all well and good, but after Infin­i­ty War and Endgame the whole lovesick teenag­er rou­tine feels incon­se­quen­tial in the grander scheme of things. As Fury quips, ​“Bitch please, you’ve been to space!”