With great corporate intellectual property comes great responsibility, and Spider-Man: Brand New Day has a lot to carry a lot on its red-and-blue-suited shoulders. It’s coming off a Spidey film, 2019’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, that was a highlight of the series, but left our friendly neighborhood hero and the narrative in a weird place (memory erasing, M.J. pining, multiverse yadda yadda yadda). It has to tee up the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s next big swing, the all-hands-on-deck Avengers: Doomsday. And it needs to remind folks why they initially fell in love with the MCU’s grand storytelling experiment after several years of superhero fatigue, brand over-extension and way too many brick shots, as well as ensure the financial stability of not one but two conglomerate-owned studios.
There are a few other things on Brand New Day’s to-do list, which we can’t quite get into for reasons to do with spoilers and plot twists and the standard fan-service-surprise ballyhoo. What we can say is that all the manic business on display, all the cross-franchise cameos and referencing, all the shoehorned bits of human contact and attempts at emotional connection in between big bang-pow-boom set pieces — none of it does this fourth Spidey flick any favors. The movie keeps getting tangled in a complicated web of its own making, one that feels all too familiar after several decades of superhero cinema sucking up the cultural oxygen. Calling this Brand New Day feels like a cosmic joke. It’s the same old MCU B.S., coasting by on the considerable charm of its two resident stars and a legacy of good will. There’s nothing new here whatsoever.
Well, there is one new thing, but again, decorum prevents an open discussion about a major element. Before that throws everything into a tizzy, we get to swing around New York with Peter Parker (Tom Holland, once again doing a lot of literal and figurative heavy lifting) and see a montage of famous comic covers and splash pages get recreated before our very eyes. Everyone lives in a post-No Way Home state of collective amnesia about Spider-Man’s real identity, which allows him to lead a life of full-time crimestopping. But it also means that his true love M.J. (Zendaya) and his best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) no longer know him. This leaves Parker in a state of perpetual moodiness when he’s not, say, talking shop with a police detective named DeWolff (The Bear’s Liza Colón-Zayas) or keeping the Scorpion (Better Call Saul’s Michael Mando) from causing chaos. He still continually reads the note he wrote M.J. but never gave her, explaining how they were once inseparable. He still keeps the paper coffee cup he got from his soulmate at a donut shop.
Yet some strange — lower-case strange, not upper-case Strange — occurrences are happening both around and to Spider-Man that are cause for serious concern. Some sort of mutation seems to be occuring, which involves the amount of arachnid hormones in Parker’s bloodstream spiking to dangerously levels. Symptoms include migraines, muscles seizing up, his eyes turning completely black, and steroidal toxic-male rage. “The spider is trying to eat the man,” one characters says, and should Parker not find a way to inhibit this “monster” within, he runs the risk of becoming his worst possible self. Even Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), a guy who’s gone to great lengths to control his own raging id, is more than a little worried.
Even more troubling is a series of robberies centered around the Department of Damage Control, a government facility dedicated to containing and controlling supper-happenings, that’s run by a bureaucrat named Metzger. He’s played by Tramell Tillman, in what can only be described as a casting coup. The actor earned breakout status thanks to perfecting a mix of faux-friendliness and corporate shadiness on Severance, and that combo is put to extremely good use here. Someone or something keeps trying to break into the fortress-like building and find something. The term “V-Max” keeps getting thrown around. Sometimes they hack the data files; other times they commandeer a tank and bust right though the walls.
What’s truly unnerving, however, is that whoever is perpetrating these crimes has the ability to control minds. Even worse: they can jump from brain to brain, like they’re skipping from one landing pad to the next. Cue: a whole lotta scenes of random passerbys suddenly jerking around, grinning maniacally, and taunting Spidey about his inability to catch whoever is possessing them. The identity of the culprit is a mystery. All Spider-Man knows is that he needs to stop this person or persons before they go after M.J. or, y’know, destroy all of NYC in an attempt to take the department down.
Tom Holland and Jon Bernthal in ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day.’Sony Pictures
There was a long-running comic series that ran from the 1970s to the mid-1980s known as Marvel Team-Up, which paired Spider-Man with a new superhero partner every issue. It’s hard not to think of Spider-Man: Brand New Day as the movie version of that series, given how many other Marvel characters show up and share beaucoup screen time with the webslinger. Or, at the very least, wonder if director Destin Daniel Cretton (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) and screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers cut up a bunch of Team-Up issues, randomly stapled pages from them together, and called it a shooting script. Here’s Spidey and the Hulk. Here’s Spidey and the Punisher (Jon Bernthal, wasted). Here’s Spidey and [Redacted]. Here’s Spidey and [TRIPLE-REDACTED]. Spider-Man is not only in constant peril regarding his DNA breaking down and battling an unknown bad guy, he’s also at risk of being reduced to a supporting player in his own movie.
Given how so much of the action is reduced that peculiar 21st century CGI spectacle that somehow feels both way too expensive and way too chintzy, and how the numerous webslinging scenes look more like stock video-gameplay than ever — there are even occasional switches to first-person-shooter POV shots — you’re relieved when Brand New Day slows down to let Holland and Zendaya share scenes. Yes, the excuses used to finally get them in the same frame together run the gamut from strained to getthefuckouttahere. Yet when they do get to interact, you remember why that relationship has been the backbone of these films. Holland, in particular, has matured nicely in terms of the character and expressing the burden that comes with losing everything by doing the right thing. The heartache behind Spidey’s sacrifice after the previous movie’s memory wipe is the heartbeat of this, which you can occasionally hear above the din.
And for the love of Steve Ditko, there is a lot of din in Brand New Day. Famous people drop by to do big exposition dumps. Marisa Tomei graces a few ghostly flashbacks. The movie adheres to Chekhov’s Ninjas rule, where if you put some deadly assassins known as the Hand on the mantle in Act One, they better go off in Act Three. You may notice Sadie Sink is listed on the film’s IMDb page. We can confirm the Stranger Things star is in the movie, and we believe that’s all we can legally say about that. The big twist cynically reeks of not just of fan service but of blatant stage-setting, as if this is whole Spidey adventure is merely a time-filler in between nerdbait nuggets and bigger, more star-studded cross-franchise endeavors. The present is 100-percent prologue here. The requisite post-credits tag could not feel more gratuitous or useless. The disclaimer “Spider-Man will return” — oh, you think?! — has never seemed like less of an idle promise and more like a threat.
Michaela Coel in ‘The Christophers.’Claudette Barius/NEON