Spider-Man: Far From Home Review

The film has an awkward job, following the largest event in the franchise with a school trip, and it mostly solves it by taking the grief seriously in small moments and then getting out of its own way. Tom Holland plays a kid who wants to go back to being a kid, and the scene where he simply hands over a piece of world ending technology because he is exhausted is better character work than most of the fights around it. Jake Gyllenhaal is the reason to watch.

The illusion sequence, a hallucinatory cascade of collapsing graves and inverted buildings and infinite receding corridors, is the most daring stretch of filmmaking the studio has produced, and Gyllenhaal plays the fraud as a wounded middle manager with a grievance about credit. The weaknesses are familiar ones. The romance with Zendaya is charming but thin, the supporting classmates are joke delivery systems, and the drone finale over London reduces a great illusionist to another effects swarm. The credits reveal is a genuine jolt. A minor film that is more fun than several major ones.