Well…
Spider-Man: Far From Home. The second Tom Holland starring Spider-Man film.
Very popular among both audiences and critics where, according to rottentomatoes.com, it boasting an incredible 90% positive for the critics and 95% positive to audiences.
Which means that a miniscule 10% of professional critics didn’t like the film and, of the audiences that showed their opinions, only 5% didn’t like it.
Man, sometimes it feels lonely being in the minority.
But before I get into that, here’s the movie’s trailer:
Now the reason this is a Sorta review is because I didn’t see the entire film.
I know, I know… how can you review it if you didn’t see the whole damn thing?
Welp, here’s the thing:
A few months ago I tried very hard to watch the film start to end and the opening 40-50 minutes were so godawful to me that I simply couldn’t watch them without shutting it off.
Multiple times.
I would watch, say, 10 minutes before it proved too much for me and off the movie went. Then, perhaps even the very next another day, I’d try again, this time going through another 10-15 minutes before -once again- shutting it off. I did this in total some three or four days more or less in a row and, to put it bluntly: That first half of the movie proved almost completely unwatchable to me.
The plot goes like this: Peter Parker/Spider-Man’s (Tom Holland) class is going on a European field trip and Parker is hoping to express his love to “MJ” (Zendaya) while his friends and rivals and two teachers chaperoning them all have their own adventures.
Slowly, oh so very slowly, it is revealed there’s a danger in Europe and Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) wants Spider-Man to look into it while he tries to advance his romantic life and “enjoy” the field trip.
Turns out there’s a new super-powered being, Quentin Beck aka Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal) who claims to come from another world that was destroyed by this threat coming to Earth.
But, for those familiar with the comic book character, its pretty obvious there’s much more to him than meets the eye.
It was, again in my opinion, painful to watch. The humor was beyond obvious and groan-inducing. The set up toward the danger moved along at a snail’s pace.
Those opening scenes proved simply too much for me and, after 3-4 attempts at getting through the first hour of the film, I gave up and thought that was that.
Not everything works for you as a viewer and, while I have absolutely nothing against the vast number of people who loved the film (good for you!), I just couldn’t do it.
Fast forward to a couple of days ago.
While flipping through the channels I found one of them showing Spider-Man: Far From Home and it was, I’m assuming, from roughly the point where Spider-Man first realizes Mysterio is actually a villain and the web-slinger has his first major fight against him.
While the sour feelings I had toward the film’s first half lingered, I nonetheless decided to watch and…
…it wasn’t bad.
Not at all!
So I kept watching, catching roughly the last 40 plus minutes of the film and found that section was pretty exciting stuff with some really great CGI effects.
Ladies and gentlemen: I really liked what I saw!
…but…
It didn’t diminish my very negative feelings toward the film’s first acts.
Though I haven’t seen the entire film (there are probably some 20 or so minutes of the middle section I have yet to see), I find myself with some really contradictory feelings about Spider-Man: Far From Home.
The first parts are and IMHO remain absolutely dreadful. The conclusion, on the other hand, is quite exciting and very much worth catching.
Perhaps this is the first review where I’ll say: If you’re like me and are interested in seeing the film and find the first parts not to your liking, then fast forward the film and watch its conclusion.
That part is quite good!