Thoroughly entertaining and rib-ticklingly hilarious, 'Far from Home' nicely wraps up Phase Three of the MCU.
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As the final post-Avengers: Endgame film of Phase Three of the MCU, ‘Spider-Man: Far from Home’ has a lot to live up to and to wrap up. It’s a considerable amount of pressure on director Jon Watts. But that pressure doesn’t seem to show on screen as ‘Far from Home’, while more modest in scope, is humorous and zesty and full of fun.
In the post-Thanos world, Peter Parker is still struggling with the death of his mentor Tony Stark and with the responsibility of being an Avenger and living up to Stark’s expectations of him. Yet all the 16-year-old teenager wants to do is to take a break from Avenger duties, go on his school trip to Europe, and when they are in Paris, confess his feelings to MJ (Zendaya).
Naturally, plans go awry and Nick Fury turns up and hijacks Parker’s summer vacation. Four Elemental creatures made of fire, water, earth and wind have turned up on Earth and intends to conquer the planet. At Venice, where Parker and his schoolmates are, the water Elemental arrives and causes massive destruction. A new superhero, Quentin Beck (Jake Gyllenhaal) or Mysterio, wearing a fishbowl helmet, with the ability to fly and shoot green energy beams from his hands, arrives and successfully defeats the water Elemental.
The best parts of ‘Far from Home’, ironically, has little to do with the superheroics and CGI battle sequences. The scenes of Parker in his normal teenage life, be it, the clumsy ways he tries to sit closer to MJ in a plane that ends up backfiring, the laugh-out-loud banter between Parker and best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon), a character who deserves his own talk show, or the way Parker deals with his emerging romance between his aunt May (Marisa Tomei) and Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau), form the emotional flesh and blood of the movie and are the most fun and hilarious to watch.
As a Marvel movie, ‘Far from Home’ is pretty conventional. But if you think of ‘Far from Home’ as belonging to the high school movie genre, in which the main character happens to be Spider-Man, it’s thoroughly entertaining and rib-ticklingly hilarious.
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