‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ remembers what makes Spidey special
Tom Holland’s Spider-Man has spent the last decade on-screen growing up fast.
He went from a Queens kid to a member of the Avengers in one movie. By Infinity War, he was in space and fighting demigods on alien planets.
Now the Marvel film overseers have decided that Peter Parker has to lose everything to fully, finally become a man. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is both a reboot and a sequel. It sounds absurd and mostly works.
It’s also a franchise exercise that fights mightily against the exhaustion that comes with the territory.
The crossovers come as fast as ever: The Punisher arrives as one of Peter’s closest allies. Florence Pugh’s Black Widow suddenly appears on screen with implied history and without introduction. Peter and Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) resume their familiar and predictable mentor-student-antagonist dynamic.
Fortunately, screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, who have written the past three Spidey films, do a lot of work to lift the burden of familiarity from the audience.
They also understand that Spider-Man has always lived in a crowded world. After all, the very first issue of his own comic in 1963 featured the Fantastic Four.
Narrative shorthand tricks to catch people up don’t always work - you’re just going to have to roll with the existence of a cool gang of red-clad ninjas called The Hand and keep it moving.
The greatest success is Jon Bernthal’s Punisher, in his first appearance alongside Holland’s Spidey.
A running gag referencing an unseen Staten Island incident involving this good cop/bad cop pair arrives with the familiarity of an old pal.
Their electrifying and hilarious chemistry is worthy of their history (the Punisher debuted as a Spider-Man villain in a comic that fetches a high price today). I wish the movie devoted its two-and-a-half-hour run time exclusively to them.
Instead, it’s about the consequences of a spell that caused the entire world to forget the existence of Peter Parker. Peter asked for this in response to his aunt’s horrible death in the last movie, No Way Home. In a defining act, he shoulders the burden of isolation to protect the loved ones he has left. Brand New Day comes as a more hopeful rebuttal, about rebuilding that community.
Through his isolation, Peter’s powers begin to mutate into something closer to Sam Raimi’s version of Spider-Man, the blockbuster early 2000s portrayal that now feels mythical, with his heightened Spidey sense and organically shooting webs. It’s not so much fan service as a metaphor for adulthood.
Peter gains more arachnid-like powers, learns that strength can mean expressing pain instead of swallowing it, and he rebuilds romances and friendships.
Brand New Day enraptures when it narrows Peter’s world to him, the people he loves and his sense of duty and heroism. I would sigh in relief any time Holland’s real-life wife Zendaya appears as Mary Jane with Jacob Batalon as her roommate and Peter’s former best friend Ned.
Peter struggles against this identity crisis just as a seemingly invisible new threat terrorises New York, and he forms an alliance with the hilariously named Department of Damage Control (led by Severance actor Tramell Tillman). Numerous members of Spidey’s rogues’ gallery cameo here, but rest assured this movie keeps its focus on its villain, Tillman’s welcome debut in the Marvel universe and Spidey’s crisis of self.
I won’t spoil the main antagonist, who brings a lot of baggage that is thankfully left out of the script. Knowing fans can appreciate the choice’s implications, while everyone else gets a compelling, powerful new character to follow.
Director Destin Daniel Cretton’s last Marvel movie, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, featured some of the best action choreography in these films, and he brings that magic here.
These are the best-looking fights across all Marvel films. The highlight is a breathtaking fight with The Hand: ninja assassins who move like shifting architecture, climbing and linking with each other, collapsing and reconfiguring themselves into new formations like a school of deadly piranha.
New York City also feels real here, unlike the green-screen patches of it in past films. While Brand New Day doesn’t feel quite as fresh or grounded as Raimi’s masterful Spider-Man 2, Cretton’s Manhattan feels alive in ways it hasn’t in years. It feels good again to root for a city that’s rooting for its hero.
For all of its guest characters and ambitious premise, Brand New Day is a modest blockbuster, a “small potatoes” epic, as Black Widow describes when Peter asks for her assessment. That’s the point.
The film’s biggest weakness is inherent in its nature as a franchise product. There is so much set-up only to rediscover the foundational principles of the character. At least it works, and this film feels self-contained despite that baggage.
Brand New Day is a messy but largely successful attempt at remembering what makes Spider-Man special: that his greatest battle isn’t about villains, but the balance between his humanity and his job as a superhuman.
Isolation and punishment don’t need to come with that responsibility.