At some point, I’m going to fully commit to not bothering with these any longer – but your honor, in my defense, I’ve never missed a Spider-Man in the theater (he says in a voice that sounds suspiciously similar to “But Doctor, I am Pagliacci”). So here we are.
For just about the entirety of the 2010’s, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (or MCU, as the perpetual adolescents that populate the internet hoi polloi lovingly refer to it) was the biggest story in cinema. And Marvel’s ability to yank back the Spider-Man character from Sony, in a tale more compelling than a lot of what either studio has actually put on screen, was a flex of the studio’s all-encompassing power. But now we’re deep in a new decade, Marvel is on the wane, Gen Z doesn’t care about superheroes; having turned their attention over to videogame movies and horror efforts based on budding YouTube talent. And so now the studio, to appeal to the youngins, has broken glass on the one thing that might get those kids to put the phone down: more Tom Holland and Zendaya.
Like Batman, Spider-Man is money in the bank. Even before superhero movies had risen and fallen, the travails of Peter Parker have always been an easy sell and will likely remain so until the oncoming ecological collapse renders theaters inoperable. And Holland‘s take on the character has a nice everyman appeal. Sure, we’re really just all Tobey Maguire’s version – a nerd trying to be funny and usually failing with cornball Stan Lee-level cracks, but what we really want is to be Marty McFly who can climb on walls, and that kind of escapism is the chief draw of Holland‘s take. This remains especially true when all of the Tony Stark mentor nonsense of the previous movies is finally stripped away.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day, if the slack-jawed obviousness of the title hasn’t made it clear, is an attempt to clean the slate and give the people what they want. A Peter Parker that is a big loser. It isn’t our lovable webhead if he isn’t moping around his dump of a Manhattan apartment, sad-sacking it about his bills, some girl, and how he’s going to balance all of that with his superheroics. This one aims to drop us right into that status quo, with Peter now out of school and still reckoning with the decision he made that caused MJ (Zendaya) and Ned (Jacob Batalon), and the rest of the world, to forget he exists. Also Aunt May is dead, did I remember that happened at some point? No, reader, I did not.
Regardless, Peter is still out doing his Spider-Man thing and seemingly the only friend he’s made is Jean DeWolff (Liza Colón-Zayas), a homicide detective that acts as both his connection to the NYPD and a stand-in maternal figure, offering up over-the-phone wisdom like some kind of BetterHelp therapist. In montage, we get to see all the good Spidey is up to, beating up bad guys like Scorpion (Michael Mando), Tarantula, The Hand, all while a mysterious government ops team called Damage Control, run by Bill Metzger (Tramell Tillman) cleans up behind him. But at home, Peter still longs for his old pals, watching their Tiktok videos creep-style and still kind of hovers around their general orbit. Good enough for a Spider-Man story that’s ostensibly supposed to get things back to basics, and if it stopped there and organically grew out from the natural subplots that this kind of set-up gives way to, it might have the makings of a winner.
But no, this is the MCU Spider-Man, Kevin Feige can’t possibly allow things to stop there. As such, Peter starts undergoing some strange mutations that are causing his “spider-hormones” (this doesn’t seem like sound biology, I realize, but just go with it) to take control of his mind. This causes him to visit in with Dr. Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), now a professor at Empire State University, who gives him not very helpful advice like “maybe let the monster out.” Subtle, doc. But then there’s also a mysterious young woman (Sadie Sink) who is wreaking havoc with her ability to take over New Yorkers’ bodies, allowing her to commit all kinds of wanton criminal activity and seemingly has a very specific mad-on for Damage Control itself. AND because of the threat this new antagonist poses to Peter’s old friends, this is how The Punisher (Jon Bernthal) gets looped into all of this too, as a kind of sidekick/safe haven for MJ specifically.
If you couldn’t tell from all of that, Spider-Man: Brand New Day is an enormously cluttered experience, smothering the one lovely throughline about trying to reconnect with your old pals after so many years away with a bunch of cross-property synergistic junk. While the script on offer is surely just one of many within the Marvel stable where this is the case, I can’t recall the last time I felt this many disparate pitches grafted together to pull one of these off. Still, if the adventure itself is worthwhile, one can overlook the usual digressions that come with these things (but good lord, as these things go, what is the Hulk even doing in this movie?), but because of the amount of time spent on the Sadie Sink side of the equation, Brand New Day makes for a remarkably tension-free watch. And I mean that in the most derogatory way possible.
The lack of a compelling antagonist should at least re-center the viewpoint onto Spider-Man himself. Batman Begins is hardly a flawless film, but it used a boring villain to its advantage and built themes around it. Here, Destin Daniel Cretton (now 0 for 2 with me between this and Shang-Chi, which at least had the benefit of giving me some Tony Leung facetime) and team try to pitch a parallel between the hero and antagonist, but the former increasingly takes a backseat to the journey of the latter and the latter just isn’t particularly compelling at all. And that’s not even getting into the ethical concerns that the film leaves us with in terms of that character’s journey: a crusade that racks up quite a rap sheet, including nearly ending the life of one of the film’s main characters, and yet when things wrap up the audience is expected to accept all of this because…the cause was righteous? There’s a moral shorthand here that works fine in comic panels, but in a two and a half hour movie, it’s a dog that doesn’t hunt.
By the time the credits rolled, and I asked myself the usual “why am I sitting through these credits for a movie I didn’t like to get a crumb of what’s to come?”* I reflected on what an enormous waste of time this latest Spider-Man tale really was. Failing to resolve a number of its subplots satisfactorily, including one that drove much of the movie, for whatever reason, it ends on a really nice grace note. The kind of final bit of imagery that actually angered me more because it hints at the kind of movie Brand New Day could have been. Spider-Man has the deepest rogues gallery in comics, a tremendous supporting cast, and is one of the few superheroes to be able to carry a movie fully on his own. I don’t know why Marvel Studios keeps pretending otherwise, but perhaps next time out we can again try to get a movie that’s actually about the title character. Wish in one hand…
*you can safely leave when the credits start. There’s an end credits bit, but it’s not at all worth the time it takes to get there. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.