The following story does NOT contain spoilers for Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Promise.
The people love Spider-Man. You know this. I know this. Bigwigs at Marvel Studios know this. And it is for this reason that a new Spider-Man movie typically arrives with more fanfare than your run-of-the-mill superhero movie. Fans haven’t only come to love the Tobeys, the Andrews, and the Toms that have come before, but also the adventures to outer space and the horror of sitting in the backseat on the way to the prom. For these reasons and more, expectations are just a little bit higher when it comes to Spidey’s big-screen adventures.
The expectations for a new Spidey flick just feel higher, and that’s something that Spider-Man: Brand New Day, his fourth solo adventure in the MCU, has to contend with from the jump. It’s also why it’s so hard to talk about the movie—because to get into too much of the detail of what the movie is really about would reveal secrets that have been deliberately kept under wraps.
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Luckily, the homework here is kept to a minimum. We haven’t seen the web-slinger, played once again by Tom Holland, since his last solo outing in 2021’s No Way Home. This movie picks up right after, moving a couple of years into the future as we see Peter Parker adjusting to a run-down life in New York where everyone knows their friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man—the heroic, quick-witted crime-stopper—but no one remembers Peter. He’s not happy about this development, but he’s content with it too, shutting himself off from a life that includes friends or any semblance of a social life and instead spending most of his time setting bad guys up for capture by the NYPD.
That makes up approximately the first 10 minutes of the movie. Sure, Peter wants to figure out a way to get his girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) and best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) back into his life, and he writes up a letter attempting to explain everything to them. But this movie is 145 minutes long, and you know there are screenwriters whose job is to make sure nothing is that easy. We’ve got a franchise to move forward. The credited screenwriters are Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, who previously wrote Spider-Man adventures Far From Home, No Way Home and the dreadful direct-to-Apple TV rom-com Ghosted. But Challengers writer Justin Kuritzkes is also credited for “additional literary material,” so if you sense a more mature and grounded touch, that may be where it’s coming from.
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Brand New Day adds a number of new cast members to its ranks, as it quickly establishes a far more lived-in New York than we’ve seen before. The most notable of those include a pair of Emmy-winning actors in a very game Liza Colón-Zayas (best known as Tina from The Bear) as the detective working with Spider-Man most often and keeping him out of trouble, along with Severance’s Tramell Tillman bringing his ability to switch vibes from friendly to deadpan on a dime as a powerful government bureaucrat. Jon Bernthal also brings his absolute A-game as Frank Castle, known also as the violent antihero the Punisher (but never referred to by that name in the film), while Mark Ruffalo gets to add some gravitas to the cast while continuing to Hulk out 14 years after he made his franchise debut in The Avengers.
The film’s marketing campaign hasn’t hidden the fact that Sadie Sink, the Stranger Things star, is in the movie. But they have hid just about everything else, putting her out on the promotional trail without much of anything to say about who she’s playing or her role in the movie. And, so, at this time, I’ll respect that and not reveal who the famously red-haired 24-year-old is playing.
But I will say that her storyline is not only the best and most compelling thing Brand New Day has going, but it’s also so compelling that the scenes that come after wind up feeling like they’re spinning their wheels. And all we really want is to get back to whatever is going on with Sadie Sink. Her performance is the film’s standout, and director Destin Daniel Cretton clearly had a plan when it came to using her.
Early on—in an early scene that finds Spider-Man and the Punisher chasing a runaway tank (!) through Manhattan—it becomes clear that the Department of Damage Control (DODC) (originally established in Spider-Man: Homecoming as a corrupt agency for Tony Stark to make a buck off his own destruction) is under siege from an unknown assailant. Marvel fans who’ve kept up with both the films and the shows in recent years (and who would recognise this man) know that DODC has been becoming more and more evil as time passes, often functioning as enforcement for one kind of gross government overreach or another. Worth noting.
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Brand New Day is a fun ride that feels, perhaps more than any other MCU Spider-Man adventure since Homecoming, like a classic, slice-of-life Spider-Man comic arc. It’s got a beginning, middle, and end—all of which are included in this one film. There’s little gesturing toward something greater, instead the focus is on telling this story well. And in that regard, Spider-Man: Brand New Day delivers. I’ll say no more for the time being.
This article by Evan Romano was originally published on Men’s Health US
