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In movies, superheroes don’t tend to want for company. They organize themselves into leagues and squads and dynamic duos. They’ve got fans in every corner of the metropolis, as well as some pretty major significant
others. (Even Batman the nihilist avenger snaps back to being Bruce Wayne the social butterfly.) But in “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” Peter Parker (Tom Holland) has become a workaholic crime fighter, driven but isolated. We see him nab a slew of villains with sticky-web precision, then head back to the corroded attic New York apartment where he lives like a hermit, surrounded by computer screens, tinkering with electro-mechanic devices that are designed to hone and focus his powers.
But it’s a lonely crusade. Peter, while no longer a high-school student or an MIT wannabe (Tom Holland is now 30, and has grown into a more stylishly confident actor), is obsessed with perusing the social-media videos posted by MJ (Zendaya), the love of his life, and Ned (Jason Batalon), his smart-mouth best friend. All their memories of Peter were wiped away by Doctor Strange at the end of “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” Doing that was the only way that Peter could save the multiverse. Now, when the three of them finally meet up, MJ and Ned look at Peter and see a total stranger. As for Peter’s beloved Aunt May (Marisa Tomei), she was killed in the last film. Is it any wonder he’s a Spider-Man gone “Taxi Driver”?
In 2021, “No Way Home” made $800 million in the U.S. alone (no, that’s not a misprint — the film earned close to $2 billion worldwide). And while it’s tempting to say that this many fans can’t be wrong, my own experience of “No Way Home” was that its flamboyantly convoluted tale of triplicate Spider-Men (Holland, Andrew Garfield, Tobey Maguire) was at once a brilliantly orchestrated, deviously cynical act of nostalgia-as-star-marketing and a movie that gave me a profound headache.
Coming after “No Way Home,” “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” can feel, at times, like a balm of contemplative drama. The new movie was directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, the gifted indie director who took a leap into Marvel fantasy with “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” (2021). In “Brand New Day,” you feel how hard he’s working to craft a comic-book movie that’s thoughtful, humane, and “mature.” But when you can feel how hard a movie is working to be those things, it tends to detract from the goal.
In outline, “Brand New Day” covers the waterfront of what we want from a superhero movie. It’s got a satisfying quota of bombastic and vertiginous action, notably an extended sequence where Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk comes into the picture. (He’s working with the dark side, but mostly he’s just there so that we can have some Hulk time.) It’s got a hero with a healthy dollop of inner trauma under his wholesome façade, a likably disgruntled action-prole turn by Jon Bernthal as Punisher, and a villain who’s far from a hissable cartoon. Yet if the movie is fun at times, it’s also arduous, clunkily episodic, and half an hour too long. I was glad to see that “Brand New Day” doesn’t get lost in the superhero-fatigue syndrome of CGI overkill, but the movie is more earnestly busy and self-serious than it is emotionally involving.
Part of the problem is the amnesia plot. For a while, it’s playful and poignant that Peter, when he finds himself in the same room with MJ, has to confront the fact that she has no memory of him. These scenes now carry a meta teen-idol dimension (since the two stars got married earlier this year). After a while, though, the basic situation becomes a bit dramatically frustrating. We want the relationship between Peter and MJ to be a journey, not a frozen piece of sad irony.
“Brand New Day” was written by the Marvel movie veterans Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, whose story comes at us in blocks of concept. Early on, Peter discovers he’s losing his powers — or, rather, that as a result of too much concentrated arachnid DNA, his powers have been discombobulated. We think that maybe we’re going to see an echo of the traumatic drama of “Superman II,” one of the classics of the superhero genre. But Peter just needs to repair himself with an “inhibitor,” a silvery doohickey that he affixes to the back of his neck. He gets his powers in line again. But if “Brand New Day” was going to introduce this theme, the film should have sustained it to the end, not just presented it as an open-and-shut chapter.
For a while, the villain is intriguing: a mysterious force who can enter the mind of anyone (except Spider-Man). This dark ability is expressed by the image of people getting knocked back, one after another, as if by a magnetic field, as the villain’s telepathic abilities jump from one host to the next. Spider-Man might be talking to someone who says something sinister, and we realize that they’re just channeling the villain. But so what? The film thinks this concept is more resonant than it is (it’s out of a B horror movie). At last, we learn who the villain is, and she’s not quite…a villain. She’s actually a character with an honorable and sympathetic motivation. Sadie Sink plays her with heartfelt urgency, but what, exactly, is the dramatic point of a villainous showdown that turns into a lovefest? It’s as if the movie were presenting comic-book villains as an identity group in need of salvation.
Destin Daniel Cretton stages the Spidey action with a clever, leaping grandeur that delivers what these movies need to. “Brand New Day” is destined to make a boatload of money, because when it comes to the primal appeal of Peter Parker the high-flying web-shooter in his red-and-blue spandex, this is a series that will not quit. You can appreciate that the filmmakers tried to serve up something besides the same old connect-the-multiverse-dots adventure. But “Brand New Day” is watchable without ever being transporting.
