I'm impeccably disappointed.

I'm someone who doesn't care in the least about superhero movies in general, but I fell in love with the Tom Holland iteration of Spiderman because his appearances in recent MCU movies were characterized by such wit, humor, energetic pacing, and real pathos.

All of the above disappears here, despite the facts that the acting elevates the script, and that this movie was evidently directed by the same guy who did _Homecoming_, which I generally adore.

_Far From Home_ seems to have been intended in large part as a kind of springboard for the future potential of the character, but everything falls flat. Is the problem simply that such elevation of the story was too much for Jon Watts to handle? I'm inclined to think that that's the case, but I'm nonetheless befuddled, because _Homecoming_ had so many flourishes of witty and sympathetic insight.... I fully expected that Mr. Watts's talents there would have shined through here, but this one feels like it was directed by an entirely different and boring creature with no handle whatsoever on what makes Spiderman, like... fun.

I'm grateful that the cash-loving Sony/MCU/Illuminati(?) executives finally recently found a way to contractually allow Hollandspiderman to continue to be a part of the established MCU narrative, because changing the current combination of actor/character/filmuniverse would suck 80% of the fun out of said universe. Therefore, I say this to the executives, etc., who may have driven _Far From Home_ into the ground: If you did anything to derail Watts's instincts during the making of this movie, *please* back off and let him do his thing in the upcoming Spiderman installments.

On the other hand, if it was simply too much for Mr. Watts to balance character development against general enjoyability this time around, please turn the direction of future SM movies over to Taika Waititi. After all, he was the guy who made me care about frikkin' Thor.