Spider-Man: Far From Home

Jon Watts’s second Spider-Man film has the difficult job of following the biggest film its studio has ever made, and its answer is to send a class of sixteen-year-olds to Europe and let them get sunburnt. That is the right answer. Peter Parker (Tom Holland) wants two weeks off, a window seat next to MJ (Zendaya) and a moment on a bridge in Prague; the film wants that too, and every scene that lets him have it is a pleasure. The trouble is the other film running alongside, in which things made of water and fire attack tourist landmarks, and that one is slack.

Holland is the reason to watch. He plays Peter as a boy who has been to space and back and still cannot work out where to put his hands when a girl looks at him, and he gets laughs from a pause as often as from a line. Zendaya gives MJ a flat, watchful deadpan that turns out to be shyness with better armour, and the two of them, side by side on a plane or a tram, are better company than anything the plot brings in. Around them the class is well drawn: Jacob Batalon and Angourie Rice fall into a holiday romance in the airport queue and conduct it with the solemnity of a fifty-year marriage, while Martin Starr and J. B. Smoove play teachers who have long since given up counting heads. Anna B. Sheppard dresses Peter in clothes that look packed by his aunt and, later, in a black suit Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) hands him that the children promptly name after an animal.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s Quentin Beck arrives in a cape and a fishbowl and plays it dead straight, which is the correct choice. He is a tired soldier from somewhere else, kind to Peter in a way nobody else has time to be, and a scene between the two of them over drinks, about what it costs to be the person everyone leans on, is the best written stretch of the film. Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers’s script is at its sharpest here: it understands that Peter is looking for a new adult to tell him what to do, and that this is not a healthy thing to be looking for.

Then the Elementals turn up, and the film stops. A water monster fills a Venice canal; a fire monster stamps through a Prague carnival. Matthew J. Lloyd shoots the cities in warm evening light, terracotta and lamp-glow, and the creatures are dropped into that light with no weight and no texture, so that they look like something happening on a screen inside the film rather than in the square. We were bored during the Prague fight, and we noticed we were bored, which is not how a set piece is supposed to go. Michael Giacchino’s score does its best to sell the danger with brass and choir, but the pictures under it are not frightening and the music cannot make them so.

There is one sequence, in Berlin, in the back half, that we will not describe. It is the one time the film’s action and its ideas are in the same frame, and it unsettled us far more than we expected a 12A to manage: Peter is made to doubt what is in front of him, and editors Dan Lebental and Leigh Folsom Boyd cut it so that we doubt it with him. Claude Paré’s designs for that stretch are the only production design in the film that feels made by hand rather than rendered. It runs perhaps five minutes. We would have taken twenty.

Against Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), this is the looser and the more scattered film. The first one kept its hero on a small stage and let him fail there. This one keeps saying the word Europe and never quite decides whether it is a comedy about a class trip or a franchise instalment with paperwork to file, and the paperwork wins more often than it should. Marisa Tomei and Jon Favreau, as May and Happy, get a fond running gag and not much else.

Worth an evening if you have a fondness for the character, and probably a better one at home, where the monsters shrink and the jokes do not. It runs 129 minutes and carries a 12A. Stay for the credits; for once it matters.