★★★★
A lower, sadder Spidey flick that finds its centre in the trio of John Bernthal, Sadie Sink, and Zendaya – playing more than one character – with the franchise constraints mostly handled well.
Some spoilers below…
Peter Parker spends a good part of the opening of Brand New Day watching other people’s phone footage. Ned and MJ appear in it, getting on with lives that have no room in them for him, and Peter scrolls. Cretton, who did so well with Shang-Chi, knows how to let the sadness linger. Holland is very good at the jokes, as he always has been, but the humour here has somewhere sadder to sit.
The title comes from the run Marvel published in 2008, after Mephisto lifted the Parker marriage out of continuity and the books carried on as though it had never been there. Strange’s spell at the end of No Way Home left Peter in much the same position, and this film treats the arrangement with a seriousness the comics rarely managed.
There is some housekeeping to get through first. Peter’s powers have gone haywire thanks to overactive arachnid DNA (triggered, it is suggested, by the pain of seeing MJ kissing new new boyfriend), and he builds a small silver inhibitor at the base of the neck to sort it out. Long term Spider-Man fans will know that Spidey is a fan of inhibitor chips, and also that they have a habit of “burning out” whenever the script requires it.
Meanwhile, Spidey is facing his biggest solo threat yet: Sadie Sink’s telepath, who moves from host to host and finds every mind in New York open to her except Spider-Man’s. When Spidey tries to stop her messing with Trammel Tillman’s Department of Damage Control, they come into opposition – which puts Zendaya in danger as the weak spot in Spidey’s emotional defences. When Jean Grey (for, spoilers, it is she!) finally gets into MJ’s head, this puts Zendaya in the position of playing two people out of one body, which she does in the best scene in the picture. She is the MVP here, as she generally is, and this film can boast that it contains the two best performances of Jean Grey has ever been on screen – Sadie Sink as Grey, and Zendaya as Grey as MJ.
Bernthal’s Punisher turns up behaving like an old friend of Spidey’s, Ruffalo gets a skyscraper set piece, and the Hand all get a chance to shine. Even Marvin Jones III’s Tombstone gets a few seconds in an opening montage. There may be more of him on the cutting room floor. Speaking of which, the last stretch shows the fingerprints of reshoots, an ending pulled into a different shape fairly late. But Cretton handles the distortions of franchise filmmaking better than most directors handed this job, and the post-credits tag that points to Spidey showing up off world (or off-universe!) is a light touch to the upcoming Doomsday/Secret Wars double whammy.
Holland and Feige have got this character down pat now – this is the best Holland has ever been (in anything, sorry Nolan) and the film is perhaps the third best Spider-Man film ever made (after Across The Spider-Verse and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2), and it has an opening scene needle-drop of TV On The Radio’s Wolf Like Me to boot. Ignore the MCU burnout naysayers for now at least – who could ask for more.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is in cinemas now.