Peter Parker is a crime-fighting recluse this time out, up against a girlfriend who can’t place his face and a villain who turns out to be rather lovely. The action lands. The soul-searching doesn’t.
Comic-book movies rarely leave their heroes by themselves. They get teams, sidekicks, adoring crowds, a love interest with top billing. Even Batman clocks out and becomes Bruce Wayne, dinner-party fixture. So there’s something genuinely unusual about the opening stretch of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, in which Tom Holland’s Peter Parker works his way through a queue of criminals with brisk, webbed efficiency and then goes home to a decaying New York attic to sit alone among monitors and half-built gadgets, fine-tuning machinery meant to sharpen what his body can already do.
He is not out of high school anymore, and he’s long past the MIT dream. Holland is 30 now, and he carries himself with a settled ease he didn’t have three films ago. What Peter does have is a browser history. He spends his off hours watching clips posted by MJ (Zendaya) and Ned (Jacob Batalon), neither of whom has any idea who he is. Doctor Strange erased him from their memories at the close of No Way Home, the price of keeping the multiverse intact. When the three finally end up in the same room, the two people who mattered most to him look straight through him. Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) died in the previous installment. Small wonder this Spidey has gone full Taxi Driver.
The film wants to be the grown-up one
No Way Home took $800 million domestically in 2021 and finished a whisker under $2 billion globally. That kind of number usually settles an argument, but for some of us that film was a slick and rather cynical piece of nostalgia engineering, three Spider-Men deployed as a marketing event, and the whole thing left behind a dull throb behind the eyes.
By comparison, Brand New Day almost feels like a lie-down in a quiet room. Destin Daniel Cretton directs, having crossed over from independent film into Marvel with Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings in 2021, and you can sense the effort going into building something humane and reflective and adult. That’s also the trouble. When the reaching shows, it undercuts the reach.
The checklist gets ticked. There’s plenty of loud, stomach-dropping spectacle, including a long set piece that tears through and around a skyscraper while Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk barges in. He’s nominally on the wrong side, though the real reason he’s present is so we get some Hulk. Jon Bernthal shows up as Punisher, pleasingly grouchy, a working stiff with weapons. The hero has real unease churning under the wholesomeness. The antagonist is no cackling cutout. And still the film sags. It’s episodic, it drags, and it’s carrying a good half hour it doesn’t need. Cretton avoids the CGI slurry that has sunk lesser entries, but busy and solemn is what he lands on rather than moving.
The amnesia plot runs out of road
For a while, Peter standing in front of MJ while she registers nothing works beautifully. It’s funny and it stings, and there’s an extra layer for anyone who followed the news that the two stars married earlier this year. Then the situation just sits there. A romance needs somewhere to go, and this one is pinned in place as a piece of sorrowful irony that the script keeps returning to without developing.
Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, both long-serving Marvel writers, structure the film in chunks of premise. One arrives early: Peter finds his abilities glitching, the result of too much concentrated arachnid DNA scrambling his own wiring. For a moment it looks as though we might be heading somewhere near the anguish of Superman II, still one of the high points of the genre. Instead Peter builds an inhibitor, a small silver thing he sticks to the back of his neck, and normal service resumes. Raising a crisis like that and then closing it within twenty minutes is worse than never raising it.
A showdown that turns into a group hug
The villain holds interest for a good stretch. Someone out there can slip into any mind except Spider-Man’s, and Cretton gives the ability a strong visual signature: bodies snapping backward in sequence, as though shoved by an invisible current, while the presence hops from one person to the next. Peter talks to a bystander, the bystander says something wrong, and you realise who’s actually speaking.
It’s a decent trick that the film mistakes for a profound one. The concept is pure B-movie horror dressed in prestige lighting. Then the identity comes out, and she isn’t really a villain at all. Her motives are decent, even admirable, and Sadie Sink plays her with genuine ache. But what is a climax for, if the confrontation dissolves into mutual understanding? At a certain point the movie seems to be treating supervillainy as a misunderstood community awaiting rescue.
The verdict
Cretton stages the swinging and the leaping with real sweep, and on that count nobody will feel short-changed. Brand New Day is going to make a fortune, because a young man in red-and-blue spandex flinging himself between buildings remains one of the most reliable pleasures the movies have. There’s something to be said for a Spider-Man film that declines to spend two hours joining multiverse dots. This one just never quite lifts off the way it’s straining to.
★★★ (3 out of 5)
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is in cinemas now.