Spider-Man: Brand New Day: An underwhelming spidey spectacle

What tangled webs we weave. Following two consecutive – but not quite connected or contiguous – Spider-Man movies predicated on the subdivision of their namesake’s identity, and his status as shared studio intellectual property, the optimistically Brand New Day ditches the multiverse altogether, returning the friendly neighborhood vigilante to solo duty. Which, as it turns out, is its own kind of burden. Call it the loneliness of the long-distance web-slinger. Grieving his late Aunt May, and profoundly separated from his friend group – MJ, Ned et al having contracted a case of magical amnesia, along with the rest of the world, about his existence – Tom Holland’s Peter Parker is introduced in the throes of existential crisis. The suit is willing but the spirit is weak; he goes through his usual acrobatic, crime-fighting motions with a chip on his shoulder.  

There’s also something weird going on with Peter’s wrists, which are leaking goo, and his eyes, which keep dilating and going jet-black as his other heightened senses play tricks on him. These symptoms correspond to a sudden, dangerous (and barely explained) acceleration of the mutant characteristics that keep our hero suspended between power and responsibility. They account for his bad mood, and why he’s singularly able to resist the mind-controlling powers of the elusive, hoodie-clad telepath played by Sadie Sink, who’s rampaging through New York on a mysterious mission of vengeance. Her target is the government-backed agency called Damage Control, which specialises in super-hero clean-up; what, she wonders, have they been sweeping under the rug? 

Sink represents an infusion of fresh, Gen-Z blood into the franchise; her character’s name is technically a spoiler, though it’s not exactly hard to guess, even for comic-book casuals, given the Spider-Man series’ impending and advertised intersection with the X-Men gang as part of Avengers: Doomsday. (A hint: it rhymes with The Green Ray). Such are the open secrets of world-building – or, less grandiosely, brand-extension – and the problem with Brand New Day is less that the Internet predicted its most salient plot points in advance than that the stakes of the story amount to little more than two hours’ worth of soggy connective tissue, pulled not exactly taut by former indie up-and-comer Destin Daniel Cretton. The reason 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming remains both the best of the Holland entries and one of the more likeable MCU movies, period, is that it feels (relatively) springy, self-contained and spontaneous. That was not even a decade ago, but, slogging through Brand New Day’s portentous but underwhelming spectacle, it seems like a long time indeed.  

► Spider-Man: Brand New Day is in UK cinemas now.