It seems like there are only two certain things nowadays: death and new Spider-Man movies. Audiences apparently just love the character, so much so that even when the movies he’s in are unsuccessful, they’re still just happy to see the actors that played him in the weak installments pop up again for fun. There’s something about Peter Parker’s mix of naïveté and earnestness mixed with pathos that feels universal. Spider-Man doesn’t have angst about doing the right thing. Instead, he struggles with what that costs him. To that end, at least on paper, Brand New Day — the fourth MCU Spider-Man entry starring Tom Holland and the ninth live action feature with the character (not counting the two animated Spider-Verses) — succeeds, at least to a degree.
When last we left the webcrawler, a multiverse collision brought on by an ill-advised spell cast by Doctor Strange at Peter’s behest needed to be reversed, and the only way to do that was to make everyone — literally everyone — forget about Peter Parker. Even His best pal Ned (Jacob Batalon) and girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) have no memory of him. Before, there was great power and great responsibility, sure. But now there’s also crushing loneliness. What else is there to do except throw himself into his work saving the city?
Except all that job stress is causing a big problem. Namely, that the spider part of Peter’s DNA is becoming more dominant, leading to the initial complication of Peter growing a pair organic web shooters — why they’d be on his wrists instead of somewhere else is a question for another time. Meanwhile, a mysterious stranger with the ability to hijack people’s consciousnesses is repeatedly attacking the Department of Damage Control, a dubious organization determined to mitigate the consequences of superhero activity (they also employ a ninja cult called the Red Hand as muscle, something nobody seems to be bothered by for some reason). The identity of that character, played by Sadie Sink is — absurdly, it must be noted — something that this writer is explicitly barred from revealing here. Suffice it to say that the internet already figured it out months ago and it is manifestly not an exciting surprise. Rather, it’s another tedious setup for future MCU installments.
That’s an extension of Brand New Day’s biggest problem. Its plot strands all connect narratively, but they’re not in service of actually telling a story about who the characters are and what they want. Peter wants to reunite with his friends and find a better work-life balance, but tech babble about fixing his spider DNA or a ridiculous misdirect regarding something called V-Max (strangely, an accidental reference to Star Trek: The Motion Picture) take up all of the runtime, not to mention the egregious cameos from other Marvel characters like Punisher (Jon Bernthal), whom we last saw augmenting his workouts with broken glass and sticking a gun in his mouth, and who is portrayed here as a kind of SNL parody of Travis Bickle. Zendaya gives a typically solid performance as MJ, but as a character here she’s got nothing to do; she doesn’t understand what’s happened to her (or indeed that anything at all even has), so her moping is roundly moot.
The impulse to make a soulful movie about a psychically stranded Spider-Man is admirable and seems perfectly fitted to the text, so it’s baffling that none of the narrative beats feel anything stronger than arbitrary (why are [REDACTED] or [REDACTED] even in this?), and none of the emotional beats have any gravity. Everyone forgetting who Peter is at the end of the last one — the most important/awful thing that has ever happened to him — might as well be as minimized as the dinosaurs getting to the mainland in the Jurassic movies. Instead, there are some ninjas here for some reason.
To take a minute and find a positive here, director Destin Daniel Cretton (who previously helmed the MCU Shang-Chi movie) has decent background in intimate character-based films with stacked casts of talented young actors (cf. Short Term 12), and he manages to draw performances out of everyone that somewhat sell the shortcomings of the empty script. Further, especially compared to the last entry in this series, Brand New Day has a relatively tactile look and feel to it rather than looking like the green screen soundstage it actually is, which is a profoundly welcome change amidst the recent wave of superhero flicks. Put differently, the best parts of Brand New Day feel more at home in a tender indie drama, but they’re just too frequently drowned out by a spectacle that still struggles to do anything but spin its wheels. Or is that webs?
DIRECTOR: Destin Daniel Cretton; CAST: Tom Holland, Zendaya, Sadie Sink, Jacob Batalon, Jon Bernthal; DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures Releasing; IN THEATERS: July 31; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 25 min.
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