Peter, Principled: “Spider-Man: Brand New Day”

SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY

There are essentially three plotlines fighting for space in director Destin Daniel Cretton's Spider-Man: Brand New Day – even though, given its generous 145-minute running length, you wouldn't think any in-fighting was necessary. The narrative threads, however, still feel unjustly crammed together considering there's another, more annoying, more insidious element demanding our attention, and it's the same one that's been imposing itself on Marvel Studios releases for ages: the feature-length game of connect the dots.

Returning to his role(s) as Peter Parker and his costumed alias, Tom Holland is reliably sensational. So sensational, in truth, that I'm forced to wonder why the actor – even in The Odyssey, even in grungy outliers such as Cherry and Devil All the Time – has yet to demonstrate similar performance personality elsewhere. But so much time and focus are spent affixing events here to the eternal unreachable that is Marvel's Bigger Picture – the magnum opus Avengers: Doomsday being fewer than five months away – that Holland and Spider-Man routinely become afterthoughts, the imposed question of What This All Means for the franchise tending to make even the star's inherent likability and winning soulfulness moot. Despite his name in the title, Cretton's movie never stops reminding you that Spider-Man – perhaps the most universally beloved of the MCU's many, many superheroes – is really just another cog in the Marvel machine, and I found myself increasingly frustrated whenever the web-slinger's dilemmas were ignored in favor of reunions with figures who could've been excised from Brand New Day with no detriment whatsoever.

While that's unfortunate, it was almost a bigger bummer that I was only mildly involved in Spidey's three central conflicts in the first place. The most affecting arc finds Peter living with the losses of girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) and buddy Ned (Jacob Batalon), as 2021's No Way Home climaxed with Dr. Strange, at Spider-Man's behest and for the good of the planet, wiping everyone's minds clear of Peter Parker. Now an NYC incel in a shabby studio apartment, Peter, as we learn in a years-spanning montage, has resorted to stalking his MIT-student besties on Instagram, his only respites from relentless crime fighting being routine visits to the gravesite of Aunt May (Marisa Tomei, blessedly returning for flashback duties). After MJ and Ned graduate and move in together not far from their former pal's place, Peter crashes one of the their parties and (re-)introduces himself under a false name, and as this tragicomic conceit continues, the whole Peter/MJ/Ned quandary becomes Brand New Day at its finest. A significant part of Spider-Man's relatable appeal is that he forever seems to be a kid forced to navigate a very adult world; life seems to be one constant growing pain. And even at 30, Holland is still boyish enough, and his emotions translucent enough, to make you understand that battling a scorpion-styled nemesis is still preferable to, and far easier than, enduring the heartache of being forgotten and alone.

Obviously, because the overall tone is darker and their group dynamic has so dramatically shifted, Peter, MJ, and Ned aren't able to provide the same sort of lighthearted, quick-witted fun they brought to their previous big-screen encounters. But I was happy to at least momentarily trade that ticklishness for Holland's devastating sobs when experiencing some short-lived relief, and for Zendaya's aching, conflicted confusion after MJ stumbles upon a hand-written relic, and for Batalon's dawning recognition that leads to the movie year's most irresistible grin. I also hugely appreciated the human touches because the super-human ones were so comparatively lacking. Among the more expressly comic-book-y travails designed by screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, one finds Spider-Man contending with metabolic changes that are making him more Spider than Man, leading to unbalanced ferocity and sticky organic material being ejaculated not from Peter's mechanized web shooters, but from his own body. Although that latter ability was always a great male-puberty metaphor, it makes less sense (and is less funny) when a 22-year-old is facing such hormonal changes, and the hero-who-can't-control-his-growing-powers notion feels tired, and largely played out.

More interestingly, though ultimately more irritatingly, Brand New Day's requisite über-villain is an unseen, unnamed Big Bad whose psychic powers allow them to leapfrog from one individual's consciousness to another's, scooting from person to person in hopes of locating some mysterious thingamajig stored away at the Department of Damage Control. (These days, “Department of Damage Control” may as well be the moniker for Marvel Studios itself.) This is a Blumhouse-horror kind of trope; at times, its employment suggests what we'd get if Spider-Man mated with Smile. And for a while, it's a kick, even if the spasmodic seizures of the “possessed,” with the invisible host moving from one body to the next, begin to look like bizarre, unintentionally hilarious modern-dance choreography. Yet once I realized, fairly early on, how this subplot was devised to tie Cretton's feature to the Marvels that will presumably follow, I began to resent it intensely. Between Manhattan thugs, DNA alterations, and MJ landing a boyfriend who's not him, Peter Parker has enough on his plate without having to presumably act as a Doomsday intermediary.

Based on the current evidence, though, all roads appear to be leading to Doomsday, which may well send the faithful into delighted apoplexy, but which can't help but bother those of us who'd prefer to enjoy (or not) one Marvel entertainment at a time, thank you. Why else, in Brand New Day, would so much screen time be devoted to Mark Ruffalo's extended cameo(s) as Bruce Banner and Hulk, the latter of whom goes on a brutal rampage that's only tangentially related to the story, and that seems to exist merely to show why the “Smart Hulk” of 2019's Avengers: Endgame may not be around this December? Why is Jon Bernthal's Frank Castle/Punisher from streaming TV being newly introduced as a continual thorn in Spidey's side – and why do they keep referencing a never-visualized Staten Island incident – when this is the first time, on big or small screens, the characters have met face to face? (Has Marvel become so perverse that the studio is now making us do homework on films and TV series that don't exist?!) Why is Florence Pugh's Black Widow Yelena Belova here at all? This question isn't actually a complaint, mind you; as she so frequently does, that brilliant deadpan comic Pugh steals the entire picture. But still, the spiky Russian is clearly around only to form connective tissue between Spider-Man and the Thunderbolts*, making the *New Avengers indirectly tied to the Punisher, who's now indirectly tied to Hulk and the Old Avengers, who are now indirectly tied to yet another piece of Marvel IP … . Jesus, I have a headache.

There's an old Hollywood adage that I just made up: $1 billion worth of global ticket-buyers can't be wrong. While Brand New Day's worldwide box office on opening weekend missed the one-bil mark by about $68 million, the film will no doubt have crossed that threshold by the time you read this. Marvel's latest also netted the domestic box office's single biggest opening-weekend haul of all time, its $360 million narrowly eclipsing Avengers: Endgame's $357 million. And I get it. For good reason, audiences of all ages and nationalities love Tom Holland's friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, and I'm guessing it's largely because the accent, in Holland's case, has always been on the “friendly.” There probably isn't a country in the world that couldn't use some cheering up right now, and Cretton's outing delivers just enough cheer, as well as a host of terrific, thus-far-unmentioned performers (Tony nominee Sadie Sink, Emmy winners Liza Colón-Zayas and Tramell Tillman) and a few nifty in-jokes – and not simply jokes for Marvel fans. I especially loved hearing Peter Parker's AI being voiced by Naomi Watts, considering she played Holland's mom in his 2012 breakthrough The Impossible.

I still wish the movie were better. I wish the generally slack pacing was tighter, and the visuals were stronger, and the green-screening of it all (especially when Spidey and MJ are in flight) was less apparent. I wish the chaotic, indifferently choreographed action sequences weren't so endless, and that the genuine bad guys weren't so immediately evident, and that the perceived villain, just like in Thunderbolts*, didn't require an ass-kicking so much as a hug. Despite my bitching about the unwarranted incursion of other Marvel staples, I wish Florence Pugh had more than two scenes. (Hey, I'm only human.) And I really wish Spider-Man: Brand New Day didn't feel like a sequel so much as a prequel to a movie that hasn't arrived yet. For almost 20 years now, and barring the seemingly natural endpoint that was Endgame, Marvel has made a habit of selling its next installments before the ones we were watching were over. Its moderate merits notwithstanding, and like so many MCU offerings since 2019, this franchise entry isn't a movie so much as yet another, rather criminally long coming attraction. I gotta say: It's getting harder and harder to be attracted.