Eight years of multiverse shenanigans and momentum-killing Disney Plus shows have reduced the Marvel Cinematic Universe from the most reliable money-printing machine in film history to a sadly confused shadow of its former self. But Destin Daniel Cretton’s “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” — which accepts as its premise that most people can’t possibly remember or care about whatever nonsense has transpired since this mega-franchise split into several overlapping dimensions — offers such a perfect shot at redemption that it threatens to make all the false starts and fuck-ups post-“Endgame” seem like they were part of the plan from the start.
I mean, the film is practically called “We’re Starting Over,” and its drama’s crux hinges on Peter Parker and his beloved MJ clawing away the cobwebs of mass amnesia in a bid to get back to each other. Back to what matters. Back, perhaps, to the sustainable and dramatically satisfying balance that Sam Raimi once struck between Spider-Man’s power (the enduring hold his boyish reluctance has over the public imagination) and his responsibility (making superhero movies profitable and relevant again).
Alas, we are not so back. In fact, “Brand New Day” is only a few degrees of fraudulent advertising shy of “The NeverEnding Story.” Not only does the MCU’s fourth dedicated Spidey outing fail to undo the damage done to its brand since Thanos died in 2019, this dull and downbeat action sequel goes out of its way to epitomize why the mega-franchise has lost so, so much of its sauce over the last seven years. The film meanwhile clumsily slings between a Peter Parker grief drama (trite), a Frank Castle buddy comedy (forced but funny), and a labored set-up for the next few Phases of Marvel character mix-and-match (a triumphant victory for entertainment lawyers everywhere). But back!?! As the late Maya Angelou famously never said: “When someone tells you that there’s ‘No Way Home,’ believe them.”
On a completely unrelated note, here’s something you’d never have guessed from reading that last paragraph: Sony inexplicably waited to screen this 145-minute movie for critics until 7 p.m. the night before its 9 a.m. review embargo, meaning that some of us — hypothetically — might have been forced to hammer out their copy well after midnight because their three-year-old daughter woke up when they got home, demanded they sit at the foot of her bed, and then started crying whenever they tried to sneak out of the room. Hypothetically. Not that you would ever have been able to tell.
Anyway, “Spiderman: Brand New Day” is, at its most functional, a movie about how much it sucks to make friends after college. There’s a reason why high school besties Ned (a briefly goateed Jacob Batalon) and MJ (Zendaya, sharp and heartrending in the scant few moments that Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers’ garbled script invites her character to recognize some kind of emotional truth) stuck close to each other at MIT before co-leasing an apartment in NYC after they graduated.
No such luck for sad ol’ Peter Parker, who’s been left to yearn for his two closest pals over Instagram since they forgot him at the end of their previous film together. He did it for their own protection, but living with hard sacrifices doesn’t come easy, and our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man has learned to cope with his loneliness by obsessively focusing on his unpaid job as a volunteer crime-fighter. The city loves him so much that you’d think he’d just arrested international war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, but it’s hard for Peter to take in the public’s affection when the only people who ever really knew who he was under the mask no longer remember that he even exists.
That the movie is even fleetingly able to dramatize the character’s heartsick inner turmoil is a credit to Tom Holland, who can’t help but appear more capable in the immediate afterglow of “The Odyssey.” Here he delivers his most nuanced and mature Spider-Man performance to date, as “Brand New Day” repeatedly calls on the now 30-year-old actor to thwip! between wounded nostalgia, bitter self-pity, and the isolating discomfort of entering a new phase of life. Peter tries to focus his energy on catching a mysterious telepath who can hijack people’s minds by hopping from one brain to another like a skipped rock along the surface of a lake. (The relatively lo-fi effect of their psyche daisy-chaining its way from body to body across Manhattan is much neater and more upsetting than what superhero movies usually muster. That aesthetic flourish, however, can’t redeem how frustratingly the character tees up their greater purpose in the MCU.)
It’s hard enough for Spider-Man to catch an enemy he can’t even see, and it only gets harder when the bad guy trauma-moggs Peter so badly that his arachnid hormones start spiking out of control. Sure, the whole “Spider-Man losing control of his abilities” thing is a bit played out, but “Brand New Day” at least makes it a little fresh by keying into the character’s self-disgust — with both his emergent proclivity for projectile web ejaculate and also his life in general. That’s more than can be said for how the film makes use of Bruce Banner, whose tedious appearance is still the least contrived of the many ways that Marvel shoehorns random characters into an enervatingly paced Spider-Man story — one that often seems at risk of forgetting its hero just like everybody else. (It’s bad form for critics to use the word “boring,” but nothing with eight legs would ever move this slow).
The other offenses range from an amusingly potato-obsessed cameo by [redacted] to a major supporting role for Jon Bernthal’s hilariously useless Punisher, who graduates to the big leagues from the depths of streaming hell, and reminds us of that fact by constantly invoking an incident that happened on TV. And while Bernthal is delightful as a trigger-happy nuisance whose solution to every problem is to bust out bigger and bigger guns (Cretton lets him go full De Niro parody from the moment he shows up), even his best moments distract from the essence of Spider-Man’s emotional conflict.
There are stretches during the second act when Peter and MJ meaningfully address their mismatched feelings, one example of which is distractingly framed against the same neon sign from the end of “Madame Web” (whose web, to be fair, does connect them all), but it’s maddening how often “Brand New Day” sidelines its core relationship in order to spend more time on its villain’s hopelessly rote backstory, which stops the movie dead in its tracks. Or on its depiction of the Department of Damage Control, which is tasked with bringing enhanced individuals to heel (and flagrantly inspired by another Sony property). Or on its seemingly infinite supply of New York City helicopter shots, which seem very out of place in a movie that’s otherwise shot in downtown Glasgow.
Restless throughout, I didn’t get really mad at “Brand New Day” until near the end, when it comes into focus just how little this sequel has moved the ball down the field in regard to Peter Parker’s story. This could have been a vertical short. Much like Spider-Man, the Marvel Cinematic Universe knows that it can’t go back to the way things were, but it’s also absolutely clueless about how to push forward.
While Peter Parker has come to embody that uncomfortable stasis better than any other character in Kevin Feige’s domain, he has also come to suffer its consequences worse than any of his fellow Avengers (New and not). By the end of his latest “solo” adventure, the MCU’s prevailing need to stall for time has forced Spider-Man into a situation that feels miles removed from the wrenching predicament he faced at the start — a situation relatable only to that small portion of the audience who’ve quite literally had to choose between mechanical web shooters and organic wrist jizz.
The movie tries to remedy that disappointment with some razzmatazz about the power of friendship and a handful of enjoyable flourishes. Cretton is a more sure-footed stylist than his predecessor Jon Watts, and though none of the setpieces here live up to the bus fight he directed in “Shang-Chi,” a visually dynamic tank chase through downtown Manhattan and a TV on the Radio needle-drop are enough in and of themselves to give “Brand New Day” more personality than any live-action “Spider-Man” film since the Raimi days. But Damage Control is still the name of the game, and this movie causes more problems than it cures. Spider-Man can’t do it all by himself. At this rate, someone will need to come along and save him. too.
Grade: C-
Sony Pictures Releasing will open “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” in theaters on Friday, July 31.
