NB: This is a spoiler-free review.
It’s no hot take to state that Marvel’s MCU has been on an almighty downslide since the 2021 start of Phase Four and the laborious Phase 5, collectively known as “The Multiverse Saga”.
What started as a well-orchestrated superhero saga has unraveled with patience testing and increasingly underpowered movies which have strayed away from original relatability of the stories, which featured crazy superhero antics set inside the real world. The mostly filler multiverse stories not only required extensive homework to keep up but squandered too many plotlines and characters, which directly fed a state of superhero fatigue.
With Multiverse Saga-concluding (and hopefully brand damage-ending) Avengers: Doomsday on the way, can Spider-Man swoop in beforehand and remind longtime fans why the MCU was so special in the first place?
For the most part, yes, as Tom Holland’s fourth solo adventure as the beloved web-slinger is a more down-to-earth (both literally and figuratively) adventure which feels in keeping with the source material.
Following the bittersweet ending of Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), in which the spell cast by Doctor Strange ensured that the entire world forgot that Peter Parker was Spider-Man, we have something of a clean slate for the aptly titled Brand New Day.
Peter is a nobody to his best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) and has been completely wiped from the love of his life MJ (Zendaya)’s memory. Lonely and heartbroken, having to “live alone with the truth”, he deals with his existential crisis by devoting himself to being a full-time “friendly neighbourhood” crime-fighter. He’s putting bad guys away, helping the NY plice force thwart bank robberies, and occasionally teaming up with his frenemy Frank “The Punisher” Castle (Jon Bernthal).
It’s during one of these bickering team-ups that Spidey encounters a sinister new threat: an entity which can seemingly hop from consciousness to consciousness and hijack the bodies while it’s doing so. Think 1998’s Fallen with less demons and more jerky convulsions.
The mysterious unnamed figure behind this aims to infiltrate the department of Damage Control, a government unit run by Bill Metzger (Tramell Tillman) who wants to “redirect destructive energy into something useful”. If that sounds shady, your Spidey tingles are still working.
As if failing to get the work life / private life balance weren’t headache inducing enough, Peter’s anxiety and stress start manifesting physically, triggering an imbalance in his human/arachnid DNA. Trauma-triggered spider puberty, if you will – only with a pinch of Cronenberg seasoning.
Set exclusively in the Five Boroughs, it’s refreshing to see a comic-faithful and street-level Spider-Man story in which our wall-crawling hero deals with “small baby potato stuff” and not Avengers-sized “big potato stuff”, as one spud-obsessed cameoing star describes it. Director Destin Daniel Cretton, who has taken the reins from regular director Jon Watts, does a great job in committing to the character’s comic roots reset, making the stakes believable, and ensuring the emotion matches the spectacle.
In this respect, his efforts are matched by Tom Holland’s. The actor continues to perfectly capture the spirit of the character but here gets the chance to step away from the puppyish and wise-cracking energy he’s previously nailed to better explore a forlorn young man bruised by solitude. He sells the drive, the isolation, the pathos following the loss of Aunt May, and no matter how familiar the “Can Peter Parker and his web-shooting alter ego happily co-exist?” arc is, Holland elevates it by showing a darker, more emotionally resonant side to both facettes. Commendably, he still lets some light peek through, especially during his interactions with The Punisher – with Bernthal bringing a welcome New York “I’m walking here!” swagger to the mix.
Still, there are issues…
The back-to-basics first half of Spider-Man: Brand New Day is its strongest, and is initially weakened as the script starts to shoehorn in characters seemingly for the sake of it. As great as it is to see Bruce Banner / Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), his appearance is mostly for exposition and needed a stronger hook in order to not feel contrived.
As for the main “antagonist”, it’s hard to talk about this character without spoiling the big reveal. The role has been deliberately kept secret and out of the film’s promotional material, so it would be a crime to give the game away here. Safe to say that she’s played by Sadie Sink, who delivers a creepy and compelling performance which promises much, as we will see her again in coming MCU instalments. However, her character’s storyline takes over in the more sluggishly paced second half. The film never loses sight of Peter, but the script does noticeably sacrifice what made the first half so promising in order to once again fall into the MCU world building trap. A fully-fledged standalone story would have worked best, as opposed to dedicating so much time to setting up a crucial future player and prioritising franchise tie-ins.
Despite its shortcomings and not being the slam-dunk the MCU so badly needs, Spider-Man: Brand New Day is bolstered by consistently strong action sequences and a terrific performance from Holland, who can now safely be crowned the greatest on-screen Spider-Man. All four of his solo outings prove how badly Marvel needs him on its roster of heroes.
The studio is back later this year with more multiverse antics with the gigantic Doomsday team-up, a reported $700m gamble set up to reclaim the box office juggernaut title in what feels like a make-or-break moment for Marvel. In the meantime, head honcho Kevin Feige would do well to learn from Brand New Day, which stands as the best MCU movie since 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home. Faint praise, granted, but it shows that a grounded adventure of the loneliest web-slinger in New York beats all the overstuffed scale-over-relatable-stakes shenanigans from Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. Your move, Doom.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is out in cinemas now.