Spider-Man: Brand New Day review: 'swinging through the streets of Glasgow'
Tom Holland does strong, nuanced work in this latest Spider-Man adventure, but it’s a shame he keeps getting sidelined in his own movie, writes Alistair Harkness
Spider-Man: Brand New Day (12A) ★★★
It’s been nearly five years since the multiverse-smooshing shenanigans of Spider-Man: No Way Home brought Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland’s Peter Parkers together in one movie. Coming after some of Marvel’s post-Avengers failures — Covid only partly accounted for why Eternals and Black Widow underperformed — its gimmicky success was a reminder that the party was far from over when it came to superhero cinema.
That’s not the case now. Plenty of comic book movies have come a cropper in the last few years as audience fatigue has set in and even though there’s a big new Avengers movie due this Christmas (featuring the return of Robert Downey Jr to the MCU), there’s a lot riding on Spider-Man: Brand New Day to both recapture the spirit of the MCU in its heyday and move the franchise forward.
Given this, it’s perhaps appropriate that Spider-Man himself seems to be undergoing something of an existential crisis. Picking up a couple of years on from the memory erasing finale of No Way Home (when Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange cast a spell to make the world forget Peter Parker was Spider-Man), the film finds the once-again anonymous Parker throwing himself into his crime-fighting superhero role while doing his best to erase all trace of his everyday identity lest it jog the memory of MJ (Zendaya), the erstwhile love of Parker’s life. With no memory of him, she and Parker’s best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) have moved on with their lives, leaving Parker sad and alone and reduced to cyberstalking them — and MJ in particular — on social media.
If this makes Parker seem like the sociopathic shy-guy protagonist of Obsession, the film quickly whips us away from such icky considerations with a plot involving a telepath who’s able to possess random people — supervillains among them — and use them to wreak havoc on New York, mainly to infiltrate the not-at-all-shady-sounding Department of Damage Control. Which is how Spidey, in the film’s first big set-piece, finds himself swinging through the streets of Glasgow, here doubling for downtown Manhattan, in pursuit of a tank. Cars are duly flipped, webs are spun and buildings are destroyed — though the best thing about it is the arrival of Jon Bernthal’s Frank “Punisher” Castle, here making his first movie appearance in the MCU having previously fronted two seasons of The Punisher TV show (one of the few good Marvel shows).
It’s certainly a little disconcerting seeing the grizzled protagonist of that eye-wateringly violent (and very adult) series rock-up in a 12A certificate film, but Bernthal’s comically reined-in vigilante schtick provides Spider-Man with an amusing foil in these early stages, as does another Marvel franchise cameo whose casting is enough of a spoiler not to mention in a review.
Sadly, other crossovers are less successful, including, disappointingly, Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner, whose Hulk alter-ego has confusingly been reframed as a villain when that was very much not the vibe of his appearances in the various Avengers and Thor films.
Ruffalo is mostly called upon to deliver science-laden exposition to help explain some of the weird changes Parker finds himself undergoing now that he’s focusing solely on being Spider-Man. These include some mutations that will be familiar to anyone who grew up on the Sam Raimi Spider-Man films and these in turn give Brand New Day a pleasing, body-horror-style strangeness as Parker’s arachnid side starts throwing his body out of whack, with various sticky emissions functioning as amusingly on-the-nose metaphors for how his enforced loneliness and pent-up desire for MJ might be affecting him physically and mentally.
This is not “incel Spider-Man”, however, and actually the film is at its best when it eventually confronts the awkward reality of Parker’s self-sacrifice and what that means for MJ, who’s had part of her memory erased without her consent. Here Holland and Zandaya (who are married in real life) deepen the characters in ways that feel much more grounded and nuanced than we’re used to seeing in these films, and director Daniel Destin Cretton (who made the enjoyably bonkers MCU film Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) is smart enough to take his foot of the gas to give his actors some space to act.
Yet sometimes he takes it off the gas too much. The arrival of Stranger Things star Sadie Sink — playing a character that will be familiar to to many Marvel fans — takes the film off in yet another interesting direction, but her character’s significance to future Marvel films also makes this one feel weirdly sluggish thanks to the way Spidey gets sidelined in his own movie for long stretches. That relentless seeding of future instalments has always been one of the MCU’s less endearing qualities; it’s too bad that with the promised new start of the title, Brand New Day didn’t leave it behind.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is in cinemas from 31 July
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