Spider-Man: Brand New Day and all the images you see in this review are owned by Sony Pictures Releasing
Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton
Who doesn’t love good ol’ Spider-Man? Well if the box office is anything to go by, then the answer is no one, because this thing is making money like nobody’s business; certainly more than anything Disney has put out recently. Heck, even Toy Story 5’s billion dollar haul pales in comparison to the numbers that Spider-Man is putting up! Does the friendly neighborhood wall-crawler live up to the hype and truckloads of money in this latest outing, or are we all so desperate for any Spider-Man movie that we’ll take a mediocre one? Let’s find out!!
Following the events on No Way Home, Peter Parker (Tom Holland) has taken to his job of Spider-Man with gusto; foregoing any relationship that doesn’t involve punching and webbing, and pining for the life he no longer has which only becomes more difficult when his former friends Ned and MJ (Jacob Batalon and Zendaya) move back to town. Couple this with a new threat in the city that can seemingly control the minds of anyone they want, and we’ve got the recipe for a Spider-Meltdown which manifests as bizarre powers that Peter can hardly control. Will Peter have to lose himself to become the Spider-Man the city needs to fend off this newest threat? Can he finally come to terms with what he lost and start his life anew, or do the echoes of his past guide him to be the best hero he can be? Will the movie answer these questions and more while also giving us awesome ninja fights!?
In case you had any doubts about this and are waiting on bated breath for a yay or nay from me, rest assured that the movie’s very good, which is a relief given how much money this thing has made already, and it’d be a shame if that kind of success was associated with a lousy product. Is it great? Well, that’s a little more complicated which, I suppose, automatically puts it below the best of the Spider-Man movies. Still, you can’t accuse the Tom Holland series of being formulaic as each one has been vastly different from the other. This might have more to do with the fact that it needs to squeeze itself into the cracks of whatever the MCU is doing at the time, but it’s given us four solid movies that can each be great for entirely different reasons. So what sets this one apart? Well, as much as I’m sure this will cause the Gen Zers out there to roll their eyes, it seems to have taken the most inspiration from the Sam Raimi films; and not just because we’re reintroducing organic web shooters. We remember the iconic moments of Green Goblin and Doc Ock, but those movies were also fantastic at world building and giving us lots of story in between the action bits which to my mind are the aspects of this movie that work the best. It feels looser than the previous outings as most of this movie is about seeing Spider-Man go through his Spider-Day in a city that feels big and bustling. We’ve had globe-trotting adventures and journeys across the furthest stars, but rarely has a place in the MCU felt as big as New York City when he’s a small little speck of red lost in a sea of enormous skyscrapers. The world can be won and lost in what feels like a long weekend in these movies, and yet the relatively small story being told here feels much more important because it clearly takes place over a significant period of time. Many people relate to Spider-Man because his day-to-day life feels close to our own as he struggles with all the same things we do; love, loneliness, bills, laundry, you name it. As much as I enjoyed seeing Spider-Man happy and well cared for in the earlier MCU films like Homecoming and Far From Home, and I still maintain that outright tragedy is overrepresented in the Spider-Mythos, there is something important about taking the time to watch him be sufficiently human and this movie finds its heart in those moments.
That’s not to say that this is just a drama that occasionally has a guy in red and blue pajamas. It’s a summer blockbuster with Disney’s money to spend, so of course it looks fantastic. The web swinging has only gotten better with each movie, but the grounded setting helps to give this one a sense of weight and scale that could feel a bit lacking in some of MCU Spidey’s previous adventures. The action is solid throughout with plenty of goofy fights with classic comic book villains, though I feel they didn’t get the most out of Michael Mando as Scorpion, but I guess we’ve got to save something for the sequels. On top of that, the exciting comic book stuff is made all the better by that loveable murderer Frank Castle who kills it in every scene he’s in and will surely become the most popular character in the entire MCU after non-Netflix watching audiences see him in this. It’s actually a shame that they’ve mostly kept Jon Bernthal in the super serious and ultra-gritty side of the MCU because he’s an endless font of charisma and his unmatched intensity is just as good for getting laughs as it is for conveying grief. Most importantly, he doesn’t come off as a cameo and ends up being such an integral part to Spider-Man’ story, both in terms of the plot and as a foil for self-imposed isolation, and his big set-piece action scene with Spider-Man and someone else who I won’t spoil here is the best Superhero punch-up that the MCU has put together in some time.
Once again, however, a MCU movie stumbles hardest when it comes to the big bad, and in doing so leaves us with a flat climax in the third act which is a shame given how fantastic the action and drama was up to that point. We’ll need to venture ever so slightly into spoilers here, but I found the central mystery to be rather lacking once everything was revealed, and with that as your starting point for the climax, it was fighting an uphill battle. The fact that the villain is someone we know from Marvel but has never been associated with Spider-Man feels like a twist for the sake of the MCU first and this movie second. It’s a good performance and I’m sure they’ll be able to shine in their own movies, but I would have preferred someone who didn’t feel like they wandered in from somewhere else; I mean you had Michael Mando right there! On top of that, the secondary twist as to what motivates the villain is incredibly obvious; even if they hadn’t cast an actor famous for playing a villain to be the subject of their ire. It’s a shame, because the low-key and personal aspects of this story with Peter trying to rebuild his life and possibly reconnecting with his friends is where I found myself on the edge of my seat, whereas the double-crossing, meta-human, evil-corporation, and superhero stuff that didn’t directly involve Frank Castle screaming at something is where I would lean back and focus more on my popcorn.
The advice I would give to the Spider-Man franchise going forward is to keep it simple. We know that these movies and these characters will always be box-office gold, so there’s no need to try and impress us with grandiose storylines and inter-movie continuity. Both can work, and there are several points in this movie that deliver on those concepts, but whenever I felt that the movie was struggling to stay afloat, it was when it was trying too hard to punch above its weight class. Spider-Man is an interesting character, the city of New York is a wonderful setting, and the inter-personal conflicts he’s forced to deal with give us more than enough drama to carry us through to the end. For everything that it does right, I can’t help but give it my highest recommendation, but all of the excesses of the plot ended up wearing me down by the end. We’re getting Doomsday at the end of the year and I’m sure the X-Men movies will have big casts with world-changing events, so let’s just let the Spider-Man movies focus on the kid from Queens, okay? Him and his violent friend who likes to yell a lot and shoot people!
The Reviewers Unite 