{"id":43737,"date":"2019-07-08T12:10:40","date_gmt":"2019-07-08T16:10:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/?p=43737"},"modified":"2019-07-08T12:10:55","modified_gmt":"2019-07-08T16:10:55","slug":"spider-man-far-from-home-movie-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/2019\/07\/spider-man-far-from-home-movie-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Spider-Man: Far from Home \u2013 Movie review"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Bob Garver<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Following\n\u201cAvengers: Endgame,\u201d the MCU needs someone new at its head. Iron Man and\nCaptain America will not be returning, Thor and the Guardians of the Galaxy are\noff in space somewhere, Ant-Man and Captain Marvel just had movies in the past\nyear, and Black Panther\u2026 has a country to run. I can\u2019t really think of a better\nreason not to make him the face of the franchise going forward. But Peter\nParker aka Spider-Man (Tom Holland) is still around, the character has a great\ntrack record at the box office, and no doubt some of his mentor Tony Stark\u2019s\nleadership qualities rubbed off on him. Pinning the MCU on him going forward\nmakes a lot of sense on paper, but judging by \u201cSpider-Man: Far from Home,\u201d it\nmight not be such a hot idea in practice. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

            The\nfilm opens smartly by explaining what happened to the people who were lost for\nfive years between Thanos\u2019s finger snap in \u201cInfinity War\u201d and the undoing of\nthe snap in \u201cEndgame,\u201d which apparently include all the main characters in this\nfilm. It\u2019s been an adjustment: grades have to be repeated and apartments have\nbeen sold, but things are slowly getting back on track. Peter\u2019s class is going\non a field trip to Europe, and he wants to confess his love to MJ (Zendaya), he\njust needs Spider-Man to not be needed for a while. But wouldn\u2019t you know it,\nEarth is under attack from element-based monsters (Fire, Water, etc.) and Nick\nFury (Samuel L. Jackson) needs Spider-Man to step in and save the day. Can\nPeter heed his hero\u2019s calling and still get the most out of his vacation? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

            At\nleast he\u2019s not alone in battling the Elementals. Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal) is\na superhero from a parallel universe where the Elementals have destroyed the\nplanet. He claims to need Peter\u2019s help in ridding this version of Earth from\nthe monsters, but he seems perfectly capable of handling them by himself. Maybe\nhe\u2019s the new top-dog superhero the MCU needs. Followers of Spider-Man lore know\nthat Mysterio is a pretty high-profile member of his rogues gallery, but then\nagain Batman got through a whole movie in 1989 without Harvey Dent turning into\nTwo-Face, so maybe Mysterio won\u2019t be a bad guy here. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

            The\neventual central villain is problematic. For starters, the character reveals\ntheir true colors in a big speech to a roomful of henchmen, giving the scene a\nstrong tinge of \u201cAs you know\u2026\u201d redundancy. Also, the scene comes at a time when\nthe film is conspicuously lacking a charismatic villain, because the film\npractically goes out of its way to make it clear that the Elementals aren\u2019t\ncutting it. Perhaps worst of all is that the character is yet another MCU\nvillain whose motivation is that they\u2019re mad at Tony Stark for not giving them\ntheir due. How many of these chapters could have been avoided by Tony just\nwriting a check? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

            With\nall its \u201cAmerican teenagers in Europe\u201d antics, \u201cSpider-Man: Far from Home\u201d\nwants to be one of those \u201cfun\u201d MCU movies, like \u201cAnt-Man\u201d or the \u201cGuardians of\nthe Galaxy\u201d or \u201cThor: Ragnarok.\u201d That\u2019s fine if the movie can pull it off, but\nfor me, this movie doesn\u2019t. It\u2019s by no means terrible, but I\u2019ve seen other,\nbetter movies about teenagers with superpowers (including last year\u2019s far\nsuperior \u201cSpider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse\u201d) and there\u2019s a whiff of staleness\nthat this movie never manages to shake. The film is getting excellent reviews,\nso feel free to see it for yourself and say I\u2019m wrong, but after the grand\nfinale of sorts that was \u201cAvengers: Endgame,\u201d this movie doesn\u2019t make me\nconfident that the future of the MCU is in the best hands. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Grade: C<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NOTE: Stay tuned all the way\nthrough the credits on this one. A mid-credit sequence features one of the most\nlaudable casting decisions of the whole MCU and a bonus at the very end\nrecontextualizes a number of events throughout the film. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSpider-Man: Far from Home\u201d is\nrated PG-13 for sci-fi action violence, some language and brief suggestive\ncomments. Its running time is 129 minutes. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Bob Garver             Following \u201cAvengers: Endgame,\u201d the MCU needs someone new at its head. Iron Man and Captain America will not be returning, Thor and the Guardians of the… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":43738,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[108],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43737"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43737"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43737\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}