Spiderman: Far From Home review

MEGA spoilers. It's one of the most spoiler heavy MCU films.

The 1st MCU movie post-Endgame. The final movie of phase 3. Far From Home is the first look at what the MCU is actually going to look like now that Endgame has closed so many doors and finished off so many major characters. But it also wants to be your kind of expected fun superhero romp. It works at both, although after one viewing I would say that Spiderman: Homecoming was the overall better movie.

This one takes place an unspecific time after the Tony snap(the 5 year disappearance of so many people is called "the blip"), although it seems like it was at least a few months since everybody came back. Peter is more concerned about his upcoming class trip to Europe, and his  plan to tell MJ about his feelings for her, than any Avengers type missions.

But he gets pulled into one by Nick Fury, as a superpowered man dubbed Mysterio needs help defeating the last of the "elementals", creatures who he has followed here from an alternate earth after they destroyed his. On the plus side, Mysterio seems cool, and Peter gets some high tech glasses that were left to him by Tony.

So here is the spoiler stuff that to many won't be a spoiler at all. I mean, Mysterio is a villain. He's the bad guy. He is such a famous Spiderman bad guy that even I knew about him. Now true, the filmmakers could present him ultimately in a different way, but they don't. About halfway through the film he is revealed as the bad guy. He is a former Stark underling whose work was not appreciated, and he has teamed up with some other disgruntled ex-Stark employees to hatch a scheme to make him into a superhero. He basically wants to be an Avenger, and if he has to cause a lot of destruction and maybe kill a few of our heroes to get there, so be it.

Jake Gyllenhaal is pretty good as Mysterio. But he is not one of the great MCU villains. His powers are cool, and the sequences of him using his "illusion tech" are visually astounding. One in particular is just top notch stuff, like out of Doctor Strange. But if you know he's the villain, you kinda just spend the whole time waiting for everyone else to catch on, so it's a bit frustrating. And his big scene where he reveals his villainy is weird, cause he just stands there and has a big exposition dump where he explains to his crew what they are doing and why.

Homecoming also had a mid-movie reveal involving the villain, although that one was more of a.clever surprise, and frankly Michael Keaton's Vulture was just a more compelling adversary.

Homecoming was a funnier movie than this, I think, although there are a lot of laughs here too. Jon Favreau gets a ton of the best laughs. Lots of funny Ned stuff. You do miss that Peter-Tony dynamic from the last movie.

I liked the Peter-MJ stuff here. I wish the one trailer hadn't spoiled her finding out he is Spiderman, cause that scene is actually one of the best in the movie. And the 2 of them get to do a fun spin on one of the more iconic shots from the earlier Raimi films. I just really love Zendaya in this role.

More than most MCU movies they really drop a couple big ones in the post credit scenes.
The first one picks up immediately after the credits roll. Mysterio(from the dead? I'm not sure) has framed Peter for his murder, and revealed his identity to the world, and who reports the juicy news? J. Jonah Jameson... played by JK Simmons! The guy behind me yelled "holy shit" and I don't blame him. That's so fucking cool they got Simmons back. And he's basically an Alex Jones now (J. Alex Jones-ah Jameson?). I'm not sure how this will play in the next Spiderman movie. I would think proving Peter's innocence would not be that hard considering how many know the truth.

The other scene reveals that the Fury and Maria Hill we saw this whole movie were actually Talos and his wife from Captain Marvel. I knew something was fishy about Fury just from the trailers. I thought maybe the Mysterio multiverse thing was gonna be real and maybe he had brought HIS earth's Fury. This is cool though, and not just cause I love Ben Mendelsohn as this character. We also do see the real Fury up in space with the Skrulls, looking like he is having a virtual vacation in Tahiti ("it's a magical place"). So he could be setting.up a sort of new version of SHIELD that's stationed in space. And who knows how long Fury has been gone in the first place.

It's just the kind of tags to keep us all guessing. And now this is it for the MCU for a while. The Black Widow movie is 10 long months away, although we should get 1 or 2 of those Disney+ series before then.