Left eye, motherf**ka!

SPOILERS WITHIN

In the backlogs of this blog, you will find a horrendously scathing review of 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, which I found to be a dishonorable mess and a poor facsimile of a John Hughes movie. This month’s sequel, Spider-Man: Far From Home, is everything its predecessor was not, and I’ve never been prouder to say that!

As the events of Avengers: Endgame take their toll on the world in the year 2023, New York’s friendly neighborhood wall-crawler, alias Peter Parker (Tom Holland, The Current War), is seeking an escape, particularly in the wake of the sacrifice of Tony Stark, his mentor. Conveniently, a summer school trip across Europe brings such an option, until a call from Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson, The Hitman’s Bodyguard), an encounter with the enigmatic Quentin Beck/Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal, Source Code) and elemental beasts puts a different tack on Parker’s need for rest and relaxation, and makes who he can trust all the more difficult.

Homecoming was, I felt, a cinematic trainwreck as a result of six (credited) writers’ conflicting visions. Though I worried at first with the return of two writers from said film, Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, they are the only ones credited, and wisely so — any more than three writers on a script, I feel, causes a movie’s main characters and objectives to be lost in the herd of subplots and gags. What’s more, this feels like a Marvel Studios film, which the first outing did not feel like at all — eschewing the emulation of the late John Hughes brings a freshness to the film that proves itself a worthy heir to the throne of Sam Raimi’s saga, one built by writers like David Koepp, Michael Chabon and Alvin Sargent. Notedly, the film is not bogged down by the preceding Avengers films, but it does not bury them in the past — rest assured, if you want to see this, you’ve got (at most) 23 movies to catch up on!

Performances are top-notch in this — Holland has truly become the best Spider-Man/Peter Parker on film, bringing all the vulnerability of a kid who just wants to be normal with the bravery of an Avenger — what else could be better? Gyllenhaal, once slated to replace Tobey McGuire in Spider-Man 2, is brilliant as Mysterio, a villain I was clamoring for to appear in this movie; welding together equal parts Syndrome from The Incredibles with his Donnie Darko persona, he’s totally unhinged and truly scary once he makes himself truly known to us. Peter’s one true love, MJ (Zendaya, The Greatest Showman), is much less of an Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club clone and is truly cute when she reveals her knowledge of Peter’s alter ego. The MCU’s erstwhile connecting thread, Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson, Chi-Raq), returns in a capacity akin to his appearance in Iron Man 2, but don’t let that deter you if you weren’t a fan of that film; he serves a much greater purpose in this than he did there, as does Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders, Delivery Man).

Spider-Man: Far From Home is, at long last, a truly wonderful outing for the eponymous web-slinger — shaking off all the dusty mess that was Homecoming, integrating a genuinely terrifying villain in Gyllenhaal’s Mysterio, and charming performances from Holland’s Peter Parker and his surrounding classmates, plus a few shocking revelations that mean one hell of a sequel is inbound. Bravo, Marvel Studios and Sony!

Rating: 4.5/5