Spider-Man: Far From Home

Spider-Man: Far From Home follows Tom Holland’s Peter Parker as he and several classmates arrive in Europe for a two-week summer field trip, with complications ensuing as Parker is forced to don his superhero suit after an elemental villain launches a series of attacks. There’s ultimately little doubt that Spider-Man: Far From Home improves steadily as it progresses, which is no small feat, certainly, given the almost disastrous nature of the picture’s first half – as filmmaker Jon Watts delivers a wheel-spinning opening hour that’s rife with pointless, incoherent action sequences (ie such moments are dominated by an egregiously aggressive use of CGI). The weird, meandering narrative remains a fairly palpable problem right up until a certain mid-movie plot twist, after which point the picture does begin to adopt a surprisingly watchable quality that’s enhanced by an ongoing inclusion of compelling sequences (eg Parker has a heart-to-heart with Jake Gyllenhaal’s mysterious Quentin Beck). And although the climax is, perhaps predictably, a little too frenetic for its own good, Spider-Man: Far From Home, armed with Gyllenhaal’s consistently engrossing performance, ultimately does manage to confirm its place as a passable Marvel endeavor – although the movie is, more than most Marvel releases, overlong to an almost absurd extent (ie that whole first act could’ve been condensed into a 15 minute prologue).

**1/2 out of ****