on Spider-Man: Far From Home
The full review will be up in a day or so on Cultofwhatever, but here’s a snippet from the spoiler-free part of the article…
There's a sort of formula you come to expect from a superhero movie. It's a template that almost every film in the genre adheres to, from genuine "films" like The Dark Knight and Infinity War, to fan-service movies for the most in-the-know audiences like Endgame and Days of Future Past, to the dregs of the medium like Fan4stick and Batman & Robin. Comic Book movies simply flow a certain way.
They start out usually with some kind of a bang, then ease you slowly along from there, establishing the players before having a big second act fight. Then there's an immediate drop in tension as everyone regroups and resets and gears up for the big finale fight. That's it. Whether it's Batman 89, Thor: The Dark World, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, or the two crappy Ghost Rider movies we don't talk about, that's the formula.
Spider-Man: Far From Home in that regard feels like two movies put into one.
It too begins with a bang, has a great mid-film action sequence, and a baller final fight, but the way those beats are presented in the story happen...twice. This is a two hour movie: In the first two minutes there's a bang, at the thirty minute mark, a medium sized fight, an an hour mark there's a big fight, and then everything resets and we do it over again. Mind you, the story doesn't reset, but the way the story hits its notes does. It's very weird to watch the movie unfold, so much so that I was almost distracted by it.
It's like watching a two-part movie series---like The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, or The Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock---but trimmed up and condensed into one two hour package. It made for a movie that never slowed down, never caught its breath, and never let up.
The result is one of the MCU's best films and the best Spider-Man movie thus far.
The movie earned a 10/10. If you’re a comic book fan, you won’t be disappointed.