Four years after No Way Home, nobody remembers Peter Parker (Tom Holland). He arranged that himself, and Brand New Day is about the bill arriving. It is the most grown-up of the four films, and it has a lot more on its mind than the fights.
Alone in a city of eight million
Peter is Spider-Man full time now, in a city with no idea who he is. One of the people he loved is dead. The other two are alive and living lives he is not in.
So he does what people do. He works, takes on far more than he should, stops looking after himself, and calls the whole thing responsibility.
The film keeps its cards close for a long time. It opens in a nostalgic register, all backward glances, then slowly turns into something with far higher stakes. For a good stretch you do not know what it is really about, or who you should be worried about. Mostly that pays off, though it does ask for some patience early, and the threat stays a bit abstract until it gets near MJ (Zendaya).
The powers are getting away from him
Something in him is changing and it is growing faster than he can hold. He reaches for the webs and misses. The harder he pushes, the worse it gets.
Then MJ is up there in the air with him and it all comes back. He can see every line. He shoots clean.
Nothing about his body changed in those two minutes. That is the smartest thing in the film, and it runs right to the end. The less he has, the less of himself he can control.
Which tells you what this is actually about. Not a villain and not a power set. A man who has decided that carrying everything on his own is the same thing as being responsible, and is quietly falling apart doing it.
Sadie Sink walks off with it
Sadie Sink is the best thing in this cast, and it is not close. She is the only genuinely new element on screen and she takes the film somewhere none of the returning players could have.
One caveat. The register sits close to her Stranger Things work, so some of it will feel like familiar ground.
Tom Holland, doing it well and doing it again
He plays the distance instead of the sadness, which is the harder job by a long way. You feel the gap between Peter and his friends even in the scenes where all three of them are laughing.
He also does not look like a kid any more, and the film keeps having people call him one anyway. After a while it stops reading as a script tic and starts reading as nobody around him actually looking.
This is his fourth time out, though, and there is little here he has not shown you before. Good work, comfortably inside a range you already know.
Frank Castle is the surprise
Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal) should not work here. A man who kills people, parked next to a man who refuses to.
What you get is the steadiest relationship Peter has in this film. It starts as an odd-couple joke and ends somewhere much warmer, and it earns every step.
He is funnier than the trailers suggest
The fake names he keeps inventing. The running gag where Castle covers for him from a hospital bed while Peter watches from below.
Put MJ and Ned (Jacob Batalon) in a room with him and he is fine. Watch the weight land back on him the second they leave.
The fights, and the one worth the ticket
The first hour is thin on action. Some swinging, a short scuffle with Scorpion (Michael Mando), and that is about it.
It pays that back. There is a fight with somebody so far out of Spider-Man's weight class that it should be over in seconds, and it becomes one of the most enjoyable stretches here.
The one to watch for is the red ninjas from the trailer. A dozen of them moving in perfect sync, and the only sequence here that really needs a big screen.
Destin Daniel Cretton's direction is the quiet win. Watch where the camera sits during that fight. The whole thing is staged and framed like a piece of choreography rather than a brawl, and it is the most technically alive the film ever gets.
Come to this cold, without the other films, and you still get a well made and unusually sad blockbuster. Come with all three behind you and the last half hour will do something to you.
Four bulbs. Blazing. Go for that last half hour, which hits harder than anything in this film that throws a punch. It is in cinemas now.
Sadie Sink is Jean Grey. If you have been anywhere near the internet this year you knew that walking in. The film plays it as a reveal anyway.
What is actually going on. The Department of Damage Control, run by Bill Metzger (Tramell Tillman), has been experimenting on Jean to copy her powers. They did the same thing to her older sister, Sara. It killed her.
V-Max. This is the part that stays with you. Sara is dying on a table, and the only thing in front of her is a vent stencilled VENTMAX with the middle worn away. She spends her last breath sending Jean that one word. Jean tears through half a city chasing it. It is a vent. Everything she burned down was for a vent. That is the film in one scene. You give up everything for the one thing you cannot live without, and then you find out it was never anything at all.
Aunt May. Jean Grey does not get beaten and she does not get talked down. She sees what Peter Parker has been carrying, and it is somebody else's pain that finally lets her change.
How powerful Jean actually is. For most of the film you assume she is being kept on a leash, that they have dialled her down. Then she properly wakes up. The telekinesis uses a visual language close to what Fantastic Four did with the Invisible Woman, and it is the moment you understand she is one of the most powerful mutants there is. Jean Grey turning up in a Spider-Man film is still an odd fit, and the film does not really explain why here.
The Hulk fight. He was never winning that. He gets out of it because Banner comes back to himself, not because Spider-Man out-fought him, and the film is honest enough to show it that way.
Frank Castle shoots him. By accident, but he shoots him. What the film does next is the good bit. It does not drive them apart. It becomes the thing that welds them together, and by the end their bond is the most solid thing Peter has left.
The kiss. He lets himself believe love is bigger than whatever erased him, that MJ remembers. She does not. It is four seconds on Tom Holland's face and it is the saddest the film gets.
What changes in Peter. Cornered and losing, he takes off the inhibitor holding back the spider side of him. He nearly goes under. Then he holds it. That is the answer the whole film has been walking towards. He stops fighting what he is, and the moment he accepts it, the powers come back to him.
Where he is left. Peter and MJ is gone for now, and the film does not pretend otherwise. Ned is the one thread that looks repairable, and it leaves that door open on purpose.
Post-credits. A small one, nodding at the multiverse and where the Avengers films are going. Nothing that changes this movie.
Bright Bulbs
- The powers double as the emotional story. When he has someone, he has control. When he does not, he does not.
- Sadie Sink is the freshest thing in the film and the performance everyone will be talking about afterwards.
- Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal) is good in it which nobody was expecting. The odd-couple gag turns into the warmest relationship in the film.
- It carries serious emotional weight without ever losing the fun, and films this size almost always drop one to hold the other.
Dull Bulbs
- The action is well made but it is not what stays with you, and the first hour is especially thin on it.
- The detective who keeps telling Peter to look after himself is fine, but she gets one note and never a second.
Cast
- Tom Holland as Peter Parker / Spider-Man
- Zendaya as MJ
- Sadie Sink as Jean Grey
- Jacob Batalon as Ned Leeds
- Jon Bernthal as Frank Castle / The Punisher
- Tramell Tillman as Bill Metzger
- Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner / Hulk
- Michael Mando as Mac Gargan / Scorpion
- Liza Colón-Zayas as Detective Jean DeWolff
- Marvin Jones III as Lonnie Lincoln / Tombstone
- Marisa Tomei as May Parker
- Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova