“Spider-Man: Brand New Day” had everything it needed to be a great reset for the classic web slinging character, which makes it all the more frustrating that director Destin Daniel Cretton totally wastes the opportunity.
The ending of “No Way Home” practically handed Marvel the perfect setup. Peter Parker (Tom Holland) completely alone, forced to rebuild his life from scratch as a neighborhood Spider-Man. That’s the movie most of us wanted. Instead, “Brand New Day” can’t resist falling back into the same old MCU habits, piling on universe building, oversized threats, and unnecessary connections until the simple, grounded story gets buried.
The film follows Peter as he struggles to rebuild his life. His best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) and girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) have no recollection of him, and he struggles to balance his personal responsibilities with a massive new threat (Sadie Sink) who is terrorizing New York City. I won’t say more about the plot in order to avoid spoilers.
To his credit, Holland is still terrific as Spider-Man. He’s effortlessly likable, and no matter how uneven these movies become, he never stops feeling like he’s the real life Peter Parker. Holland is arguably one of the best (if not the best) casted actors in the MCU, and his strong performance here cements that fact in stone. Watching Peter exist like a ghost in his own life, silently watching Ned and MJ move on without him while carrying around the letter he’ll never deliver, is genuinely heartbreaking. It’s a powerful idea about sacrifice, loneliness, and accepting that protecting the people you love sometimes means losing them entirely.
The problem is the movie never trusts those heavier themes and quieter moments to carry the story. Cretton keeps hammering them repetitively until they lose their impact, then interrupts them with another giant action sequence or another MCU detour. The personal story aspects are good, and then the film turns into an overloaded spectacle that feels determined to remind you it’s part of a much bigger franchise instead of letting Spider-Man stand on his own.
The story is all over the places. It tries to juggle Peter’s emotional isolation, a massive invisible mutant threat, franchise crossovers, multiple villains, and bigger MCU mythology all at once, and none of it comes together in a satisfying way. The middle stretch is especially rough. Scenes drag on without much momentum, and the pacing becomes surprisingly sluggish for a Spider-Man movie. This thing feels at least an hour longer than it actually is. I started checking my watch just 20 minutes in.
Then there’s the frustrating waste of characters. Punisher (Jon Bernthal) barely gets anything meaningful to do, and Scorpion’s (Michael Mando) appearance is so brief it’s almost funny. These comic fan favorites are treated less like actual characters and more like teases for another movie coming soon, which has become an exhausting habit for Marvel.
The action doesn’t help much, either. The visual effects swing wildly between impressive and distractingly cartoonish, while the muddy, overly dark lighting makes too many sequences feel flat instead of exciting. And the introduction of a so-called “universal power adapter” that conveniently neutralizes super-powered characters like Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) has to be one of the laziest pieces of writing the MCU has come up with in a while. It’s such an obvious shortcut that it borders on parody.
As usual, everything builds toward an enormous finale that tries to wrap up every storyline, answer every question, and set up the next chapter all at once. That’s what disappointed me most.
Buried underneath all the clutter is a genuinely compelling Spider-Man story about grief, identity, and living with impossible sacrifices, and Holland is more than capable of carrying that movie. Unfortunately, “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” keeps getting in its own way, trading character for franchise obligations at nearly every turn. There was a much better film hiding in here somewhere. Marvel just didn’t seem interested in making it.
By: Louisa Moore
Screen Zealots 