By Benjamin Angrisano
@bangrisano
There is plenty to enjoy in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Tom Holland remains strong in the role, and after several years of waiting to see what would become of Peter Parker and MJ following No Way Home, there is an inherent satisfaction in simply spending time with these characters again. Holland and Zendaya are both capable performers, and the movie makes a welcome effort to refocus its attention on Peter Parker’s personal life rather than treating Spider-Man exclusively as a vehicle for increasingly enormous superhero set pieces.
The problem is that Brand New Day also feels like a movie searching through Spider-Man’s past for ideas rather than discovering many of its own.
Peter losing his powers in a crisis of confidence is only one of several elements that recall previous Spider-Man movies, and familiarity would not necessarily be a problem if this film found a particularly fresh way of approaching them. Instead, there is a persistent sense that we have been here before, and often in better movies.
That comparison is especially difficult to avoid with Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2. Those films understood something about the character that subsequent adaptations have struggled to reproduce: being Spider-Man is not simply about fighting villains. It is about having to fight villains while also getting to school and work on time, helping your aunt, trying to see your girlfriend’s play, worrying about rent, and dealing with a landlord who is a dick, even though his daughter is nice and brings you cookies.
Those details matter.
Raimi’s movies make you feel what it is actually like to be Peter Parker because Spider-Man is only one responsibility among dozens constantly competing for his attention. The superhero story and Peter’s ordinary life become inseparable. The action sequences consequently feel like significant plot beats rather than spectacles inserted because a superhero movie is due for another set piece.
Brand New Day makes some strides toward returning to that kind of personal storytelling, but the world surrounding Holland rarely feels as grounded or inhabited.
One thing I have increasingly discovered I have an allergy to in modern movies is the cheap-looking way screens are photographed or overlaid onto the image. A phone appears, and suddenly we are looking at another obviously composited screen. It is a small complaint, but it contributes to a larger artificiality that bothers me here. Even some of the bit players seem to be visibly reciting their lines rather than inhabiting the world naturally.
Compare that with the first two Raimi films, where even minor characters somehow feel like people who had lives before Peter Parker walked into the room. There is texture there. Here, even someone as important to Peter as Ned can occasionally feel like a stretch to accept as an actual human being rather than a character written to occupy a particular function in the movie.
There is a similar artificiality to Peter’s relationship with a lead New York City detective, someone he apparently speaks with almost every day. The two become so familiar that she assumes an almost grandmotherly role in his life. It is charming enough that you eventually just go with it, but there is so little backdrop or explanation for why these two people are suddenly so close. It feels like a relationship created for the sake of charm rather than one that developed naturally between the characters.
Director Destin Daniel Cretton has shown himself capable of grounded character work in films like Short Term 12 and Just Mercy. He also directed Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and that influence is apparent when Spider-Man faces a league of ninjas during a prison showdown. There is a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-like sensibility to the action that is always fun to watch on a big screen. But even when the filmmaking is enjoyable in the moment, the sequence does not particularly resonate. Like many of the set pieces here, it feels like sensationalism for its own sake rather than an inevitable collision between Peter Parker’s life and his responsibilities as Spider-Man.
Florence Pugh presents a similar problem for me. I find many of her scenes amusing, and she is an enjoyable presence, but I simply do not buy the Russian accent. There is something inherently silly about it that keeps reminding me I am watching Florence Pugh perform a character rather than allowing me to accept the character herself.
Her scenes with Holland work better because the two performers have an entertaining chemistry. The same is true of Jon Bernthal and Holland. It is always good to see Bernthal, and it is nice to see how much work he continues to get playing variations on the aggro bro with something to prove, a type he has somehow mastered while remaining remarkably easy to root for. There is something peculiar about watching the two of them commiserate throughout this movie while The Odyssey is simultaneously playing in theaters, especially once Zendaya is added to the equation.
Mark Ruffalo also makes a supporting appearance as Bruce Banner, and with him comes an entire Hulk subplot. It is never exactly annoying to have the Hulk around, but we have seen variations on this material done and done and done again since The Avengers. Another “Oh no, the Hulk can’t control himself” plotline in the middle of everything else going on starts to feel like filler.
Ruffalo himself is not the problem. He brings the same kind and invested energy to Bruce Banner that he always does, so it is never not nice to see him. Michael Mando and Tramell Tillman also do fine work in supporting roles, and both are actors I am always happy to see turn up in something. In fact, that is true of much of the cast. There are a lot of people here I enjoy watching, even when I am less convinced by what the movie has given them to do.
The larger problem for me is the movie’s central villain.
I did not care for that plotline, I do not think the character belongs in this movie, and I certainly never became invested in their brain or their trauma. Spider-Man possesses one of the greatest collections of villains in comic-book history. With so many characters available, I have trouble understanding the decision to build so much of the movie around a sympathetic child whose story feels imported from somewhere else.
The introduction of the brain-hopping idea initially intrigued me, which made the eventual explanation particularly disappointing. And while the rooftop fake-out involving MJ is among the most effective scenes in the movie, the answer ultimately does not justify the setup.
That is representative of Brand New Day as a whole. For roughly its first half, I enjoyed myself. The movie is charming, Holland remains immensely likable, and enough interesting pieces are being moved around that I wanted to see where they would land. By the end, however, very little pays off as strongly as I hoped it would.
The ending is particularly soft. Continuing the amnesia storyline into another movie should theoretically leave me eager to discover what happens next. Instead, I found myself wondering how much I really care anymore about the future of this particular iteration of the character.
That is a strange feeling considering how satisfying some of the Peter and MJ material is. No Way Home left their relationship at such a painful and intriguing point that seeing Holland and Zendaya together again naturally carries some emotional weight. Fans who have followed this version of Spider-Man from the beginning will almost certainly find plenty here to enjoy, even if I suspect many will agree that Brand New Day does not reach the peaks of No Way Home.
For me, though, Spider-Man has already been adapted too well for mere charm to be enough. The original Spider-Man and particularly Spider-Man 2 demonstrated how exhilarating the character can be when the extraordinary is constantly colliding with the painfully ordinary. Peter Parker does not stop worrying about money, relationships, work, family, or whether he is disappointing the people around him because a supervillain has appeared. If anything, being Spider-Man makes all of those ordinary problems worse.
That is what makes the fantasy work. You do not simply watch Spider-Man. For a couple of hours, you understand what it might actually feel like to be him.
Brand New Day occasionally reaches toward that idea, but too much feels recycled, artificial, or dramatically underdeveloped for the film to become something special. Holland remains a good Spider-Man, and this is a mostly charming adventure with performers I enjoy watching. But knowing just how great this character can be on film, it takes more than that to make another Spider-Man movie feel unmissable.
