It’s been a tough couple of years for the MCU, hasn’t it? Eeek.
After Infinity War and Endgame brought the Infinity Saga to a close, the world’s most successful cinematic universe has lurched forward like a spluttering steam train trying to find its track again.
From a film perspective, it’s been an incredibly mixed bag. Phase Five gave us three of the worst Marvel movies ever made – Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, The Marvels and Captain America: Brave New World. While Phase Six got off to a better start with Fantastic Four: First Steps, it still underperformed at the box office.
The MCU film machine then took a year-long breather, meaning Spider-Man: Brand New Day arrives carrying an enormous weight of expectation. Marvel is counting on it to reignite the public’s love affair with superheroes. But can it succeed?
Peter Parker (Tom Holland) devotes his life to protecting New York City as a full-time Spider-Man. But as the demands on him intensify, the pressure sparks a surprising physical evolution that threatens his existence, even as a strange new pattern of crimes gives rise to one of the most powerful threats he’s ever faced.
Brand New Day picks up with a gloomy Peter Parker still struggling to cope with the events of No Way Home. Living alone in a New York apartment, he’s desperately missing the emotional connections that once defined his life. Sadly, that’s exactly what the audience ends up missing too.
Brand New Day is the first Tom Holland Spider-Man film not to be directed by Jon Watts, with Shang-Chi director Destin Daniel Cretton taking over behind the camera.
Unfortunately, it desperately misses Watts’ lightness of touch. This is to Holland what Spider-Man 3 was to Tobey Maguire: a moody, overstuffed affair that tries to do far too much while ultimately failing to move the story forward in any meaningful way.
Tom Holland remains the perfect Peter Parker
As has been the case throughout Holland’s Spider-Man trilogy, the cast is excellent. Holland is superb as a downtrodden Peter Parker, beautifully balancing the emotion the script demands with the quipping that the MCU, sometimes annoyingly, insists on. Zendaya is sublime as always, although she’s given far less screen time than I’d have liked.
The problem isn’t the performances – it’s the story.
Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner feels like he’s included purely to move the plot from A to B, while Sadie Sink, impressive as she is, seems to belong in an entirely different film. Her performance is strong, but her character never feels organically woven into the narrative.
The same can be said of the villains. By introducing so many antagonists, Brand New Day never allows any of them to establish the looming presence of a Vulture, Green Goblin or Electro. Instead, they’re largely reduced to delivering a handful of entertaining action sequences before being hastily discarded by the script.
A rogues’ gallery with no menace
Admittedly, a sequence involving The Hand is probably the film’s standout moment. It’s inventive, exciting and exactly the sort of spectacle you’d hope for from a Spider-Man movie. Unfortunately, the film clumsily forgets the characters exist after using them for that sequence – a symptom of lazy scriptwriting.
Visually, it’s unmistakably modern MCU. That means flat colour grading, an over-reliance on CGI and an almost comical amount of product placement – the repeated shots of the BMW iX3 are particularly distracting. Oh, how I miss the days of Iron Man.
But the film’s biggest cardinal sin is that it somehow makes Spider-Man… boring.
At 145 minutes, Brand New Day feels significantly longer than it actually is. Where Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey earns its lengthy runtime through excellent pacing, this film plods along at a snail’s pace for much of its duration. A film about one of the world’s greatest superheroes should never feel this sluggish.
Overall, Spider-Man: Brand New Day is comfortably the weakest of Tom Holland’s Spider-Man films, and that’s a real shame. After the ending of No Way Home, Marvel had the perfect opportunity to take Peter Parker somewhere genuinely fresh and exciting. Instead, almost every major character finishes the film in virtually the same place they started.
Yes, Sadie Sink’s arrival hints at an intriguing future for the MCU. But if that’s the payoff for a film this dull and uninspired, I’m not convinced the journey was worth taking. It’s less Brand New Day, more same old story.
