Brand New? Really?
The latest aptly titled Spider-Man entry cues up Avengers: Doomsday at the expense of Spidey today.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day
Director: Destin Daniel Cretton • Writers: Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, based on the Marvel comics
Starring: Tom Holland, Zendaya, Sadie Sink, Jon Bernthal, Jacob Batalon, Tramell Tillman
USA • 2hrs 25mins
Opens Hong Kong July 30 • IIA
Grade: B
In the event anyone forgot (ha!), five years ago in Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) Dr Strange cast a forgetting spell on the world (I guess) after Peter Parker (Tom Holland, erm, The Odyssey) was outed as Spider-Man by Mysterio in Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019) and following a whole mess of multiverse fuckery that fanboys lost their minds over. It worked, and Peter is now so anonymous he barely exists. Nonetheless he’s gone back to protecting New York as a vigilante superhero, seemingly enjoying all kinds of cop-adjacent perks thanks to institutional protection from NYPD detective Jean DeWolff (Liza Colón-Zayas, The Bear), and creepily social media stalking his ex-girlfriend MJ (Zendaya, doing a lot with so little) and best pal Ned (Jacob Batalon, doing a lot with so little) all the way through their undergrad at MIT. He’s sad Spider-Man now, diving full on into crime-fighting to tamp down his loneliness and romantic misery and evidently reaping stock dividends from Stark Industries or something in order to be able to pay for his top floor NY apartment and buy fresh flowers for Aunt May’s grave every week.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is both a dead-on and 100% bullshit title. This fourth Holland Spider-Man entry is indeed a reset for two franchises – maybe Sony’s Spider-Verse and definitely Disney’s MCU. But it’s also a heaping pile of same same: overly CGIed action, random quips that sub for character development and overstuffed narrative threads that only gum up the works while they’re trying to lay foundations for the future. And therein lies the rub of director Destin Daniel Cretton’s (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) Brand New Day, or MCU #38. Like any MCU film it’s looking to the next film, and the next, rather than letting writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers concentrate on the present, which is when Brand New Day is at its best. Shame it’s got ants in its pants and won’t stay there.
At least they’re not Grease-ing it up
Because though this is often lumpily paced and it’s too long by 30-odd minutes, Brand New Day isn’t bad; it does quite a bit quite well. Cretton and returning writers McKenna and Sommers (who, it should be noted co-wrote the execrable Ghosted) flirt with a more mature, more measured and internalised Peter this time around, and when they bother to take a minute to linger on his isolation, denial, fracturing identity – his arachnid DNA is starting to exert itself and cause highly compelling trouble – and the dual emotional universes he and MJ suddenly occupy Brand New Day works. DOP Brett Pawlak finds Cretton an elegiac quality to these quieter moments, and for the first time four films Peter feels grounded for anyone over 17. He’s struggling with losing himself, dangerously, and in a very adult way Peter’s trying to figure out if that’s such a bad thing if his life is devoid of Ned, MJ and any kind of connection. And when it’s not in hyper-action mode, Brand New Day really pays off its comic book roots visually with more than a few panel-esque passages, and it has some of the series’ most poetic slinging-through-the-city sequences.
But those ideas and moments are truncated in order to devote time to a mysterious villain (Stranger Things’ Sadie Sink, and if one look at Sink’s physicality doesn’t tell who she is then you haven’t been paying attention for the last 26 years – and IMDb mos def will) that seems to control minds and who’s on some sort of revenge kick. Or they’re looking for V-Max. Or they want a weapon hidden by Department of Damage Control boss Bill Metzger (Severance dance party master Tramell Tillman). And why am I being so cagey? We all know who it is. Whatever. In the meantime Peter/Spidey gently clashes with New York’s other great protector, The Punisher Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal, doing grunty comedy?) even though they’re really connected by their shared experience of loss. Frank’s family was slaughtered by gangsters. MJ went to university in Boston. Boo hoo?
If ever there were a film that was critic proof, it’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Spider-Man is arguably the most popular superhero going, and Spideyheads are going to love it. For whatever reason, Holland is an incredibly popular Peter (and even I’ll admit he’s far more appealing that Tobey fucking Maguire). MCU devotees (are there any left?) are going to need it. The Home Trilogy of Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), Far From Home and No Way Home scooped up a massive US$4 billion (almost) and there’s no reason this won’t add at least a billion dollars to that total; it’s the best of the four. It would be an even better film if it weren’t so sloppy (really, Peter, you kept that letter to MJ and insist on carrying it around so she can stumble across it?), and if it could lose the Scorpion (Michael Mando, Better Call Saul) sub-plot since it literally goes nowhere existing elements couldn’t have covered, and lose the DeWolff sub-plot, or at least make it more integral to the story because Colón-Zayas is awesome and she should be in everything. But it’s fundamental raison d’être is to tee up the next Marvel… phase? chapter? in Avengers: Doomsday in the fastest, most DC way possible. Familiar characters (Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner, Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova) are shoehorned in, just in case we need them later, leaving scraps screen time for more of Peter and MJ and Peter and Ned reuniting, even if they don’t know it. Their short bits together remind us of why this Spider-Man series clicked in the first place – and make you wonder how they couldn’t find bit more elbow room in such a fat run time.